Ask a founder when they last read their own travel policy, and watch the pause. Most companies write one because a bookkeeper insisted, file it in a shared drive, and never look at it again. Meanwhile, the trips keep happening. The receipts keep piling up. Somewhere around Q3, someone realizes the line item has grown teeth.
Business travel spending is climbing again. According to a recent GBTA buyer poll, 84% of organizations expect their travel spend to hold steady or grow in 2026. That’s not a crisis on its own. But for a small company running lean, the old approach of “book it and figure it out later” isn’t quite working anymore. Small teams tend to get burned by the same handful of habits. Some are boring. Some are surprising. One of them, honestly, would be softened by adding cancel for any reason travel insurance to any trip past a certain price point, but more on that in a minute.
Look. None of this is about clamping down on employees. It’s about noticing where money leaks and plugging a few of the more obvious holes.
1. Booking Too Late
The single most common one. Airfare bought inside a two-week window can run two or three times what the same seat cost a month earlier. Small companies do this constantly, usually because a client meeting got scheduled last-minute or somebody assumed the trip wasn’t happening until it suddenly was.
There’s no perfect fix. But even a loose rule (book anything over $400 at least three weeks out) can shave real money off a year of travel.
2. Treating Nonrefundable Fares as “Fine”
This one’s less intuitive.
Nonrefundable tickets look cheaper on the sticker, sure. They’re also a coin flip. A canceled meeting, a sick employee, a family emergency, and the company eats the full fare. For a large corporation that rounds to nothing. For a five-person startup, it can be a bad afternoon.
A trip cancellation plan with CFAR coverage typically reimburses 50 to 75% of nonrefundable costs, even when the reason for canceling isn’t on the standard covered list. Arguably worth it on any trip north of a couple thousand dollars. Some might argue it’s not worth the premium on shorter domestic hops, and fair enough. Depends on the risk appetite.
3. Ignoring the Tax Rules Until April
Every year, a surprising number of small business owners try to reconstruct what was and wasn’t deductible from a shoebox of receipts. Not a great use of anyone’s time.
The IRS guidance on business travel expenses is actually clearer than one might expect. Transportation, lodging, 50% of meals, and “ordinary and necessary” costs while away from a company’s tax home are generally deductible. But documentation matters. Real documentation, not a vague memory of a client dinner three months ago.
Side note: family members tagging along on business trips don’t get their portion deducted unless they’re actual employees traveling on business. Yes, people try.
4. Not Setting a Policy at All
Some small companies genuinely don’t have a travel policy. They’re winging it. Which works for maybe three people at a similar seniority level, and then breaks the second someone junior asks whether the airport bar counts as an expense.
A policy doesn’t need to be long. Per diem, class of travel, hotel range, approval threshold. That covers about 90% of what causes friction. Publishing it beats reading minds. There are useful writeups on how corporate travel management actually works that walk through what to include if a team is starting from scratch.
Anyway.
5. Sending People on Trips That Should Have Been a Call
Not every meeting needs a plane. It’s not popular to say this, especially after everyone spent 2020 and 2021 arguing about remote work, but a fair share of small-company trips don’t earn their cost. A quarterly check-in with a vendor two states away. A conference where three people from the same team are going to hear the same panel. In many cases the ROI just isn’t there.
The counter-argument is that in-person still builds trust in a way video calls don’t. True. Probably. But the question isn’t whether business travel has value. It’s whether this specific trip has value.
None of this is meant to be prescriptive. Every business is different, every industry has its own norms. The point is that plenty of small companies drift into travel habits without ever actually deciding them. And “we’ve always done it this way” tends to be an expensive answer.
Something to think about before the next quarter of bookings, at least.
