Kelly Ellis, Global Engage Practice Lead
Paul Coverdale, Global Multimodal Practice Lead
Business travel continues to face a mix of cost volatility, disruption, and evolving traveler expectations, making resilience a critical focus for travel teams.
In our recent webinar, Building a Resilient Travel Program: How to turn market volatility into confident program decisions, we explored how organizations can stay adaptable while maintaining control during uncertainty. If you missed the session, you can access the on-demand recording here.
Following the session, we asked our speakers, Kelly Ellis, Global Engage Practice Lead and Paul Coverdale, Global Multimodal Practice Lead to address some of the top attendee questions, sharing practical perspectives on the priorities, challenges, and decisions shaping today’s travel management environment.
Using data to guide decisions
Q: How should companies approach budgeting when so many variables are still in flux?
KE: In today’s environment, budgeting needs to be more dynamic and scenario-based. The goal isn’t perfect prediction, it can’t be, it’s creating a budgeting approach that supports faster, more confident decisions even as conditions change to optimize spend. Think about cost drivers you can influence, such as policy design, ticket flexibility, supplier mix, and traveler decisions. We’re also seeing carbon forecasting and budgeting come in to play alongside fiscal budgets. The two can work together and support the overarching goal of cost management with a focus on demand management.
PC: I agree, a scenario-based budgeting approach will build that flexibility required to navigate uncertainty. It’s all about using what we know today to anticipate and plan for potential shifts before they happen.
Q: What signals or data should teams be monitoring in their program to stay ahead of change?
KE: Resilient programs focus less on trying to predict disruptions and more on early signals that indicate when conditions are shifting. Key areas to monitor include:
- Traveler behavior and compliance, which often reflects how confident travelers feel in the guidance they’re receiving
- Risk and disruption indicators, including destination risk alerts, supplier capacity changes, or operational disruptions
- Pricing and fare behavior, not just average ticket price but volatility, fare rules, and changes in refundability or flexibility and booking patterns, such as lead time, channel leakage, and shifts toward or away from preferred suppliers
PC: With airline schedules changing so quickly and dramatically (in certain markets), it’s important to know how these capacity shifts will not only affect your ability to move from point A to point B, and beyond, but also how these impact your contract performance. Together, these signals help teams spot pressure points early and adjust policy, communication, or supplier strategy before issues escalate.
Q: Can AI play a role in program resilience?
PC: Yes, of course, new technology is at the forefront of advancement, but it’s important to understand shortcomings with new technology and where people are integral to the process. Strategic insights from AI can help you read data quickly, but it won’t tell you want’s most important for you and your company and help you take the action required right now, you need people for that.
KE: Our team is working with our clients to build clear AI usage and governance guidelines and reinforce that AI is an enhancement, not a human replacement. For travel managers, the priority now is to make the travel policy legible to machines as well as humans, and to explicitly define how AI tools should be used in planning and booking. This means tightening policy language around approved channels, preferred suppliers, and ‘lowest logical fares’, so it can be encoded into OBT rules and exposed via APIs that AI browsers can read and enforce. The organizations that will benefit, are those that treat company-approved AI browsers as part of their travel ecosystem, strengthen governance rather than loosening it, rethink policy design for AI and human decision-making, and manage both risk and opportunity with equal weight.
Designing flexible policies and engaging travelers
Q: How do we avoid inconsistent decisions during a fast-moving event?
KE: Use principles, thresholds, and triggers so the policy can adapt while preserving consistency—and pair it with clear escalation paths. Ensure your policy and comms take into account booking compliance, approvals, pre-trip planning steps and tips, high-risk destinations, air, rail, ground, hotel, shared economy suppliers, security of intellectual property and traveler tracking. The policy should take all of these into account and not just the allowed price of travel. Specifying expected behavior and not leaving it up to the individual traveler to figure out what is acceptable is key to be able to support confident and possibly fast-moving decisions. This is where a well‑designed travel risk management (TRM) policy plays a critical role by setting clear principles, thresholds, and escalation paths in advance, so decisions remain consistent and defensible even when conditions are changing quickly.
Q: Is the 14‑ or 21‑day advance booking guideline still considered a best practice for managing airfare costs?
KE: Airfare pricing has become far more dynamic, especially with the expansion of NDC capabilities and continued market instability. That said, a 14 days minimum as a guide is still relevant and recommended. Policies are tending to move towards booking “as far in advance as practical”, with 14+ days as a recommended booking window. This allows programs to retain cost discipline while acknowledging that pricing behavior now varies by route, region, fare type, and ticket flexibility.
The most effective programs are reinforcing this guidance inside the booking flow, using in‑booking messages to highlight when earlier booking may still deliver value and when different trade‑offs (such as flexibility or restrictions) come into play. Embedding that flexibility into policy and booking-path communications helps guide traveler behavior in real time, rather than relying solely on static advance‑purchase rules.
PC: On the pricing side for airlines, it’s going to be more so based on the restrictiveness of a ticket. So for those corporate clients who are willing to book closer to the travel date with more restrictions and less flexibility and no refunds, there will be some costs avoidance and possible savings there. But outside of that, the 14 to 21 day advanced purchase window are still being heavily impacted by the current pricing pressure as we’ve seen our recent Travel Price Index.
Q: To ensure flexibility, is it best practice to book directly with the airline or through the booking platform such as Concur?
KE: Booking through the company-approved booking platform supports greater flexibility because policy changes, approvals, and guidance can be reflected in real-time. While direct airline bookings may offer fare flexibility, the OBT enables managed, visible, and policy‑aligned flexibility at the point of booking which is critical in a volatile environment.
Rate flexibility is about the ticket you buy; program flexibility is about how quickly your policy, guidance, and approvals can adapt, and that’s where the booking platform adds real value.
PC: Additionally, encouraging bookings through your OBT also provides greater visibility into duty of care and contract performance tracking which can help you stay agile and make quick adjustments within your program as needed.
Q: How do we reduce traveler anxiety and confusion?
KE: Timely, practical, situation-specific guidance—delivered in channels travelers actually use—reinforces trust and preparedness. Pre-trip is where you prevent avoidable risk, and offer awareness and education to reduce anxiety and level-up traveler confidence before they get on the road. In BCD’s recent traveler survey: 27% said clearer guidance would improve safety, and 3 in 10 said pre-trip destination info isn’t available but they want it.
PC: Reducing travel anxiety and confusion is all about knowing where to go when the going gets tough. Building redundancies across your travel program will allow for shifting amongst preferred partners, creating seamless remedies for otherwise difficult situations.
Q: What communications assets matter most to have ready?
KE: Pre-approved messages, executive briefs, traveler FAQs, and booking-path messaging for high-risk travel. Beyond having the right assets, when you deliver the message is just as important. It’s crucial to take an omnichannel approach reaching travelers before booking, before departure, and during disruption. Consider:
- Destination guidance including risk ratings and local norms and laws
- OBT in-journey messaging focusing on policy-compliant choices with the ability to edit quickly
- Central “go-to” intranet hub for contacts, assistance and pre-trip steps
- Proactive assets such as traveler and arranger FAQs, executive briefs, social posts and real-time mobile messages
Travel teams often benefit from support to align policy, risk guidance, booking‑path messaging, and escalation contacts into a single, practical communication framework that can be updated quickly as situations evolve.
Engaging stakeholders
Q: How should travel managers communicate changing conditions and decisions to leadership?
KE: Effective communication starts by framing changes around business impact and risk, not just travel mechanics. Strong stakeholder communications focus on:
- Explaining why conditions are changing and the implications for cost, risk, traveler experience, and continuity
- Using data and scenarios to show decisions are deliberate and structured, not reactive.
- Engaging stakeholders early so changes feel intentional and proactive, rather than reactive.
This approach builds credibility, accelerates alignment, and supports faster decision-making at senior levels.
Q: What internal stakeholders should travel teams be engaging in building a resilient program?
KE: In addition to travel and procurement, strong programs actively partner with:
- Risk & Security – to align policy, communications, and escalation protocols with duty of care expectations.
- HR – to ensure traveler guidance aligns with workforce policies and wellbeing expectations.
- Legal & Compliance – especially when operating in high-risk or highly regulated environments.
- Finance – to understand budget impacts and ensure decisions support operational and financial objectives.
Bringing these stakeholders into planning—not just crisis response—creates faster alignment when conditions shift. A travel security program assessment is a great way to identify gaps and define strategies for a comprehensive and collaborative risk strategy and risk management approach. It’s not just about having a third party risk management tool to manage alerts, it’s a holistic approach to resilience and risk management. Many organizations use a structured assessment like this to bring these stakeholders together, identify gaps across policy, communications, roles, and escalation, and define a clear, prioritized TRM roadmap based on their real operating environment.
Measuring resilience and program value
Q: How can companies measure whether their program is actually becoming more resilient?
KE: Resilience shows up not only in cost metrics, but in how well the program performs under stress. Valuable indicators include:
- Tracking metrics and dashboards with as close to real-time data inputs as possible
- Traveler compliance and booking confidence, particularly during periods of disruption.
- Speed of decision-making, such as how quickly policy guidance or communications are deployed.
- Program stability, including reduced volatility in traveler behavior despite external changes.
- Supplier performance and responsiveness, not just discounts.
- Adaptability during periods of instability and change in the travel landscape.
If travelers continue to make consistent, policy-aligned decisions as conditions change, that’s a strong sign the program is doing its job.
Q: How much spend do I need to qualify for good deals from the airlines?
PC: It’s not just about spend, there’s a much bigger picture when it comes to unlocking value through strategic partnerships. It all starts with an Air Strategy review to get a clear picture of where your program stands today using your historical data. Using this analysis you can evaluate your program against future market changes through predictive tools, so that you can make decisive strategic decisions around sourcing, contracting and program management.
Looking at sourcing through a TRM lens also helps ensure that supplier decisions account for risk exposure, operational resilience, and traveler support, not just volume and price, particularly in volatile or high-risk markets.
Start building a resilient travel program
Building a resilient travel program isn’t about predicting every disruption, but instead about putting the right frameworks in place to respond quickly and with confidence. From data-driven decision-making to flexible policies, clear communication, and cross-functional alignment, the most effective programs are designed to adapt as conditions change.
At Advito, our experts our experts work with organizations to assess their current program, refine policy and communication frameworks, and optimize supplier strategy so programs are better equipped to navigate change and perform under pressure. Connect with our team today to learn more.