Corporate travel policies are designed to control costs, manage risk and create consistency.
But what happens when some of the rules designed to save money are actually costing the business more?
New Australian benchmarking is challenging some long-held assumptions about the way corporate travel programmes should be managed, from the value of flexible fares and advance purchase rules to cabin policies and the way organisations engage their most frequent travellers.
The FY26 Australian Business Travel Digest, developed by Travel Analytics and FACTS, analysed 227 Australian corporate travel programmes, each with more than $500,000 in annual air spend.
Its findings point to an important shift.
The opportunity for businesses may no longer lie in applying tighter rules across an entire workforce. Instead, it may come from understanding how different people travel, where money is actually being spent and whether existing policies still reflect the behaviours and market conditions they were designed to manage.
In other words, the future of travel policy may be less about blanket rules and more about precision.
Most travel policies are built on sensible principles.
Book early to access better fares. Buy flexibility when plans may change. Set cabin thresholds for longer journeys. Encourage travellers to use preferred suppliers and approved booking channels.
None of those principles are inherently wrong.
The problem arises when they become rules that remain unchanged while the market, the organisation and traveller behaviour move on.
One of the clearest examples in the FY26 Australian Business Travel Digest is flexible fares.
Across the programmes analysed, businesses purchased 39,493 flexible domestic tickets and paid approximately $5.7 million in flexible-fare premiums.
The estimated cost of changing restricted tickets was around $1 million.
That’s a potential $4.7 million gap between the cost of purchasing flexibility and the financial risk that flexibility was intended to protect against.
It doesn’t mean flexible fares are unnecessary.
For travellers whose schedules regularly change, certain roles, project-based travel or trips where the cost of disruption is significant, flexibility can represent excellent value.
But it does raise a more useful question:
Rather than purchasing flexibility broadly as a safeguard, organisations have an opportunity to identify the travellers, routes and trip types where it genuinely delivers value.
That distinction is where travel data becomes important.
At Orbit World Travel, our client partnership managers work with clients to analyse booking behaviour, fare selection, policy compliance, supplier performance and travel patterns. Through tools including Orbit Intelligence and Intelligence Plus, businesses can identify where spend is occurring and, importantly, the behaviours behind it.
Because a policy shouldn’t simply tell people what they can book.
It should help an organisation make better decisions about how it travels.
Advance purchase is another area where the data becomes interesting.
At the beginning of FY26, the average domestic economy fare booked within 48 hours of departure was around 200% higher than a fare booked 21 or more days in advance.
By Q4, that premium had fallen to 63%.
The report also found that by year-end, fares booked 14 to 20 days ahead were within 6% of those booked more than 21 days in advance.
There is still a clear financial argument for avoiding consistently late bookings.
But the data suggests organisations may achieve more by identifying the travellers who repeatedly book zero to six days before departure than by applying the same advance purchase target to everyone.
That’s an important distinction.
A traveller moving from a two-day booking window to ten days may create considerably more value than pushing another traveller from 18 days to 22.
Effective travel management is therefore becoming less about whether everyone follows exactly the same rule and more about identifying where changing behaviour will have the greatest impact.
The same principle becomes even clearer when looking at traveller frequency.
According to the Digest, just 8.9% of travellers took ten or more trips during FY26.
Yet that relatively small group accounted for 47% of all trips, 40% of air spend and 40% of programme carbon emissions.
For travel managers, procurement teams and finance leaders, that’s significant.
If fewer than one in ten travellers is responsible for almost half of all trips, should every traveller receive the same level of policy intervention?
Probably not.
The greatest opportunities may sit within much smaller segments of the traveller population.
Who books late most often?
Who regularly changes flights?
Which travellers frequently purchase flexible fares?
Who travels on routes where negotiated supplier arrangements could deliver greater value?
Where is out-of-policy behaviour concentrated?
And which travellers account for the greatest proportion of programme emissions?
Understanding those patterns allows organisations to move from broad policy enforcement to targeted programme management.
Instead of simply communicating another company-wide reminder to “book earlier”, a travel manager can identify the people whose booking behaviour is materially affecting the programme and work with them directly.
That’s a much more useful conversation.
More targeted policy doesn’t mean creating the cheapest possible travel programme.
The lowest fare isn’t always the best business decision.
A traveller arriving after multiple connections, losing productive working hours or being unable to change an important trip can cost an organisation considerably more than the difference between two airfares.
This becomes particularly relevant when considering cabin policy.
The FY26 data found significant variation in premium cabin usage by region, from 16% of trans-Tasman sectors to around 60% for Europe and almost two-thirds for Middle East travel.
It reinforces why journey purpose, duration, destination, traveller wellbeing and productivity all need to form part of the policy conversation.
As Simon Andrews, Head of Client Experience at Orbit World Travel, explains:
“The best travel policies create the right balance between the needs of the business and the experience of the traveller. A policy can look perfect on paper, but if it creates unnecessary friction or doesn’t reflect how people actually need to travel, it won’t deliver the outcome the business is looking for. Understanding the traveller experience alongside the data is what allows you to make better decisions.”
Simon Andrews
Head of Client Experience, Orbit World Travel
This is where policy design becomes more nuanced.
A modern travel programme needs guardrails, but it also needs enough flexibility to recognise that not every journey, traveller or business objective is the same.
Perhaps the bigger lesson from the data isn’t about flexible fares, advance purchase or cabin class individually.
It’s that travel policies need to evolve.
Market conditions change.
Airline pricing changes.
Organisations grow.
Travel patterns shift.
New projects and markets emerge.
Technology improves.
Traveller expectations change.
A policy developed two or three years ago may still appear perfectly reasonable while producing very different financial and operational outcomes today.
That’s why policy review shouldn’t simply be an annual exercise in updating a document.
It should be an ongoing process of looking at what is happening within the programme and asking whether current settings are still delivering the intended result.
Lisa Story, Founder and Managing Director of Orbit World Travel, believes this is where the relationship between an organisation and its travel management company has fundamentally changed.
“The most successful travel programmes aren’t measured by bookings alone. They’re measured by the visibility they provide, the decisions they enable and the confidence they give organisations in managing risk, spend, compliance and traveller wellbeing.”
Lisa Story
Founder & Managing Director, Orbit World Travel
At Orbit, this advisory approach forms an important part of how we manage corporate travel programmes.
Reporting and analytics provide the evidence, but the value comes from interpreting that information in the context of the organisation.
That can mean reviewing policy settings, analysing traveller behaviour, benchmarking performance, assessing supplier arrangements or identifying areas where technology and workflow changes could improve the programme.
Sometimes, however, the analysis points to a bigger question.
Is the traditional travel management model itself still the right structure for your organisation?
For many organisations, a traditional travel management company model continues to work extremely well.
For others, particularly businesses with significant travel spend, complex operations or a need for greater internal control, a different structure may be appropriate.
Orbit’s Corporate Travel Department (CTD) provides an alternative.
Rather than operating solely as an external travel management service, the CTD model creates a dedicated travel function within the organisation, supported by Orbit’s technology, infrastructure, expertise and global buying power.
A dedicated travel team can be embedded within the business and aligned to its policies, workflows and operational requirements, while Orbit provides the systems and broader infrastructure behind the scenes.
For organisations with complex travel requirements, that can provide greater ability to adapt policy and processes as the business changes.
Kim Wethmar, Strategic Advisor at Orbit World Travel, works with organisations to determine whether this type of model is appropriate.
“The most successful travel programmes aren’t measured by bookings alone. They’re measured by the visibility they provide, the decisions they enable and the confidence they give organisations in managing risk, spend, compliance and traveller wellbeing.”
Kim Wethmar
Strategic Advisor, Orbit World Travel
The distinction is important.
The objective isn’t to bring travel in-house for the sake of it.
It’s to create the structure that best supports the organisation’s people, operations and commercial objectives.
For one business, that may be a highly managed traditional travel programme supported by Orbit’s client partnership managers, technology and reporting.
For another, it may be a dedicated Corporate Travel Department with its own IATA, database, workflows and embedded team, supported by Orbit’s finance, technology, after-hours services, recruitment, training and operational infrastructure.
Different organisations require different solutions.
Travel policy should work the same way.
For a long time, travel policy success has often been measured by compliance.
How many bookings were made through the approved channel?
How many travellers booked within policy?
How many exceptions occurred?
Those metrics still matter.
But compliance alone doesn’t tell you whether the policy itself is right.
A traveller can be 100% compliant with a rule that is costing the organisation more than necessary.
That’s why the more valuable questions are becoming:
Is the policy delivering the outcome it was designed to achieve?
Where is traveller behaviour having the greatest impact?
Which rules are creating genuine value and which are based on assumptions that need to be revisited?
And does our travel management model still suit the way our organisation operates today?
The answers will be different for every business.
And that’s precisely the point.
The era of the one-size-fits-all travel policy is over.
Orbit World Travel works with organisations to analyse traveller behaviour, programme spend, policy performance and supplier arrangements, helping identify where meaningful opportunities exist.
From strategic policy reviews and Orbit Intelligence reporting to tailored travel management solutions and our Corporate Travel Department model, we help organisations build travel programmes around how their business actually operates.
Because the best travel policy isn’t necessarily the strictest.
It’s the one that works.
1800 067 819 | sa***@*********el.au
Sources: FY26 Australian Business Travel Digest,
Travel Analytics and FACTS; Orbit World Travel.
