Corporate Business Travel: The Complete 2026 White Paper

Before diving into strategy, let us set the scene. Globally, business travel spending reached a record $1,480 billion in 2024, surpassing pre-crisis levels, and the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) forecasts $1,690 billion by 2026^[3]. France is following the same curve: approximately €30.9 billion in sector revenue in 2025, a record that exceeds the 2019 peak^[1], along with the highest growth rate in professional travel worldwide^[2]. Business travel is back, at scale, and it weighs heavily on the accounts of organisations that travel frequently.

Behind these volumes, two structural dynamics are at play. First, market consolidation: American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) acquired Egencia and then completed its takeover of CWT (Carlson Wagonlit Travel), creating a dominant player in the French TMC market^[4]. Second, mounting pressure on costs and reporting: every trip generates data (CO2, amount, purpose, supplier) that must increasingly be consolidated. In short, the market is growing and consolidating into a cost centre that can no longer be managed by instinct.

Another angle highlights the sector's maturity. Business travel carries significant decarbonisation challenges. Air travel in particular falls squarely within scope 3 of corporate GHG inventories. Finance teams that once only looked at ticket prices now also track emissions per journey, booking lead times, and travel policy compliance rates. The cost centre has become financial and social as well as environmental, which fundamentally changes the nature of the decision: you are no longer simply buying a journey. You are weighing a cost-impact trade-off.

The true cost of a business trip does not appear on an airline ticket. It appears in an aggregated total. On a typical mission, transport represents only part of the bill. The remainder is split between accommodation, meals, local travel (taxi, train, tolls, parking), TMC fees, travel insurance, and, invisible but real, the time spent booking and justifying each expense, then reconciling it. A trip with €600 in transport can cost €1,200 once all management overhead is included, and double that if nothing is planned in advance.

The trap is that a poorly consolidated cost masks the real levers. A company that does not know its average cost per trip cannot make an informed choice between lodge card and employee cash advances, between per diem and expense reports, between a negotiated TMC and open booking. Managing business travel means precisely reconstructing this cost per trip, per traveller, and per destination, provided all flows feed into the same reference system. Without integration, there is no real cost. Without a real cost, there is no informed decision.

The time dimension of travel costs is also underestimated. The more travel volumes grow, the wider the gap becomes between managed travel, where every trip is tracked from the booking stage, and fragmented travel, where each new supplier adds its own statement. Over three years, the difference in management time and reporting accuracy becomes structural. That is why travel costs are not calculated once and for all: they are built by the architecture you choose, integrated or fragmented, and they reveal themselves year after year in the average cost per trip and the quality of your GHG inventory.

1. The lodge card (virtual card / lodge card). This is the centralised, dematerialised payment method that settles the major travel items: flights, train tickets, hotels, and car rentals. A lodge card is a unique card number "lodged" with the primary supplier (the travel agency or booking platform), with no physical card issued to the employee^[5]. The benefits are threefold: single centralised invoicing, deferred payment that preserves working capital, and enhanced traceability. Compared with traditional expense reports, it eliminates employee cash advances and manual reconciliation for anything that can be booked and paid in advance.

2. The TMC and booking. The Travel Management Company is the business travel agency that structures bookings: it negotiates rates, enforces the travel policy, provides 24/7 support, and consolidates data. In France, the market is dominated by Amex GBT (through Egencia and CWT), alongside French players such as CDS Groupe^[4]. The choice of TMC is not neutral: it determines the quality of travel data, the control of negotiated costs, and policy compliance. A good TMC is also one that integrates with your expense management and payment tools, avoiding manual re-entry. Our guide compares the main players in how to choose a corporate travel agency.

3. Per diem versus expense reports. For meals and daily allowances, two approaches exist. Expense reports reimburse actual justified expenditure (receipt by receipt). A per diem pays a fixed amount per day or per meal, with no receipts required, within social contribution exemption ceilings. From a social security standpoint, lump-sum allowances for extended away trips are exempt from contributions up to specific thresholds (meals, overnight stays) that vary by zone (Paris vs. the rest of France) and mission duration^[6]. Per diem simplifies administration but requires strict adherence to these scales. Expense reports offer greater accuracy but carry a higher processing cost.

4. Travel insurance and assistance. An employee on assignment abroad is not covered in the same way as at home, and the employer's duty of care makes dedicated coverage almost essential. Business travel insurance and assistance contracts cover medical repatriation, medical expenses abroad, cancellation, lost luggage, and civil liability^[7]. The pitfall is the default coverage on personal bank cards, which is often inadequate or ill-suited to a professional context: a dedicated corporate travel insurance policy, negotiated at company level, eliminates this risk and ensures consistent protection for all travellers. Our guide details the essential coverage in business travel insurance for companies.

5. The travel policy. This is the document that governs who travels, on what terms, and with which suppliers: train classes, hotel categories, booking lead times, per-destination caps, preferred vendors. Without a written and enforced travel policy, the TMC cannot negotiate anything and costs spiral. The real challenge is not writing a policy but making it enforceable: integrated into the booking tool (to display only compliant options), managed by exception (you handle deviations, not everything), and measured (compliance rate, savings achieved). An unenforced policy is worth less than a simple one that is consistently followed.

6. Expense reports and electronic tolls. Everything that does not go through the lodge card or the TMC ends up in expense reports: taxis, per-diem meals, parking, tolls. And motorway tolls, on road trips, are a separate flow often handled by a dedicated badge. This is where integration pays off: an electronic toll badge combined with the fuel card and expense reports completes the mobility picture without adding administrative overhead. See our comparison of electronic toll badges for professional travel and our guide to expense management solutions with payment cards.

Each pillar, taken in isolation, has its own market, its own tools, and its own back-office. That is precisely the problem. A company with frequent travel typically stacks: a TMC for flights and hotels, a lodge card at the agency, a travel insurance contract, an expense management tool, an electronic toll badge provider, and a spreadsheet to reconcile everything — six interfaces, six customer service teams, six exports to consolidate at month-end. Fragmentation is not an organisational detail: it is a hidden management cost and a data loss. You cannot manage what you cannot consolidate.

That is Greenway's approach: a single card and a back-office that covers payment, expense management, fuel, and tolls. Every transaction feeds the same reference system, and 1 % of each is donated to the Greenway Foundation through the 1%ForAll® programme. Business travel becomes measurable data, not a pile of receipts.

The priority of each pillar changes radically depending on the travel profile. Three archetypes are enough to illustrate why there is no one-size-fits-all solution, yet there is a common target architecture.

The large enterprise with high-volume missions (industry, international consulting, B2B export sales). Many flights and hotel nights, often abroad. Here, the TMC and lodge card are non-negotiable: without them, there are no negotiated rates and no consolidated data. Dedicated travel insurance becomes critical (international medical repatriation), the travel policy governs classes and destinations, and cost per trip is managed at the portfolio level.

The regional SME with frequent travel (field technicians, territory sales reps). Minimal air travel, high volumes of train, car, and motorway use. The lodge card matters less. Instead, the electronic toll badge, fuel card, and structured expense reports dominate. The risk is stacking one provider per flow, which is exactly why a single solution covering tolls and fuel as well as expenses from the outset is so important.

Professional services firms and occasional business travellers (audit, consulting, events). A few missions per year per employee, but highly varied. Here, per diem simplifies administration, the travel policy stays lean, and structured expense data feeds directly into scope 3 reporting. A corporate card paired with an integrated expense management tool replaces the pile of receipts without adding organisational complexity.

Business travel operates within an increasingly precise tax and social security framework. Lump-sum allowances for extended away trips (meals, overnight stays) are exempt from social contributions up to thresholds that vary by zone (Paris vs. the rest of France) and mission duration^[6]. Beyond these thresholds, or without receipts below them, the expenditure becomes remuneration subject to contributions, which is why a tool that automatically applies the correct scales is so valuable. Mileage reimbursement, meanwhile, is capped annually (approximately €0.44/km for the 2025–2026 period for temporary employee travel)^[8].

On the expense report side, the burden of proof lies with the company: without a receipt, without a link between the expenditure, the traveller, and the business purpose, the exemption can be challenged during an audit. This is where the choice of architecture becomes strategic. Managed travel, where every transaction is structured and categorised, then tied to a mission, turns the documentary requirement into an advantage: the audit trail already exists and does not need to be reconstructed. Fragmented management, by contrast, turns every social security or tax audit into a project.

Moving from theory to action, six concrete checks are enough to avoid the most costly pitfalls: