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What Gen Z Employees Expect From Business Travel

Gen Z wants to travel for work, and judges the booking process against their phone. Three expectations, the evidence, and what to change on Monday.

公司2026年11月3日Ervin Loke
Black-and-white silhouettes of business people talking by high-rise windows overlooking a city skyline

What Gen Z Employees Expect From Business Travel

Photo: Gustavo Fring / Pexels

Picture a 25-year-old account manager in Kuala Lumpur on a Friday evening. In a couple of minutes on a phone, they book a weekend in Penang: the flight, the hotel and a Grab from the airport, each confirmed on screen. On Monday they need to be in Jakarta for a client, and the company process asks for a request form and a wait while someone approves and books it. The work trip is no harder to arrange. It is slower and less visible, and they notice.

Gen Z employees expect business travel to work as fast as their consumer apps, and their employers still need the controls that make a travel programme worth having. Most of what follows is about holding both halves of that sentence at once.

The cohort matters because of its size. Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey (23,482 respondents across 44 countries) puts these two generations at roughly two-thirds of the labour force within the next few years. In many APAC SMEs they're already a large share of the office and, increasingly, the person who signs off the trip. They are also keen travellers. SAP Concur's 2025 global survey of 3,750 business travellers found 98% of Gen Z respondents somewhat or very willing to travel for work. Their patience runs out with the process around the trip.

Key takeaways

Gen Z wants to travel for work: 98% say they're willing (SAP Concur, 2025). Their patience runs out with a booking process slower than their phone.

Three expectations matter most: book it yourself and get an answer the same day, see the policy while you book, and look it up first with a person available when a trip goes wrong.

Friction leads to leakage rather than compliance. Among companies with 20% or more of travel spend booked outside the approved tool, 53% blame missing content (Trip.Biz, 2026).

Generational claims are often overstated, and duty of care and negotiated rates still matter. The task is to give people speed and visibility inside the programme.

1. Book it yourself, and get an answer the same day

A two-day approval loop reads as diligence to finance and as a fault to the person waiting.

The corporate norm for a long time was a request: a form, an email to an agent, a message to whoever holds the company card. That made sense when finding a fare was specialist work. It makes less sense to someone who has never needed an intermediary to find a flight.

The data on how Gen Z wants to book is more mixed than the stereotype. SAP Concur's 2025 survey found 92% of Gen Z respondents open to AI-enabled booking. Yet 31% preferred to have options recommended to them, against 27% who preferred to sort through every option themselves. For this group, self-serve seems to mean control over the decision and its timing, with help in the search welcome.

Speed is the other half. If every other transaction resolves in minutes, a two-day approval loop looks like a fault, and people route around it. They book the trip themselves and sort out the claim later. The managed tools have not fully caught up. GBTA's May 2025 study with Direct Travel, Spotnana and Troop surveyed 166 travel buyers in the US and Canada in March. Only 13% said their booking tool supports self-service changes and cancellations on NDC bookings, and 64% named exchanges and cancellations as a pain point. The tool can often take the booking but not the change, which is the moment a traveller most wants to help themselves.

2. See the rule before you break it

Policy that surfaces as a rejected claim three weeks later teaches people the programme is against them.

The expectation here is that rules are visible in the moment. The tool shows what you can spend, applies it while you choose, and tells you before you book. When policy lives in a PDF nobody has opened and shows up only as a rejected claim, people learn that the programme is adversarial. The next booking then tends to happen outside it, because that's where the certainty is.

Older cohorts learned to accept opaque process as the cost of working somewhere. Younger staff, with a consumer app as their benchmark, tend to treat opacity as a defect in the tool, and they're not obviously wrong. Some of that is life stage rather than generation, a point I come back to below.

Blended travel is the clearest test. A younger traveller who is already in Bangkok on a Thursday tends to see staying for the weekend as a calendar question, and wants to know the rule before booking the return flight. The appetite is older than this cohort. The GBTA Foundation's 2017 study with Hilton found 37% of North American business travellers had extended a work trip for leisure, with millennials at 48%, Gen X at 33% and baby boomers at 23%. The policy side is what has moved since. GBTA's October 2025 poll found 43% of travel programmes now run defined blended-travel policies, with buyers citing employee satisfaction (71%) and work-life balance (68%).

3. Look it up first, with a person behind it

Search and AI have become the first stop, and a person has become the escalation path.

The standard claim is that younger travellers won't ring anyone. The evidence points to self-help first and a person second: Nextiva's December 2025 study reported that 84% of Gen Z respondents check Google and 49% check an AI assistant before contacting support. The same study found 72% likely or very likely to choose phone support again. It's a vendor study without a disclosed sample, so treat it as directional.

Disruption makes the channel question practical. In Amex GBT's 2025 survey with Ipsos of 1,817 US and UK business travellers, 45% of Gen Z said a trip had been disrupted in the past year. The figure was 36% for millennials and 32% for Gen X. Someone stuck at a gate with a cancelled flight wants the quick channel to handle quick problems and a competent person to step in when it can't. So the practical answer is to run both channels and make the handover between them smooth.

Why Gen Z friction turns into leakage

A preference can be declined, whereas a behaviour finds a way around the process.

If these were preferences, a travel programme could say no, and plenty have, for years. Behaviour is harder to refuse. When the approved process doesn't work, the trip still happens: booked on a consumer site, paid on a personal card, outside the negotiated rate and the audit trail. It is also invisible to whoever needs to know where staff are.

Trip.Biz's June 2026 survey of corporate travel buyers, The Invisible Spend in Business Travel, measured the pattern. By its count, nearly a third of companies using a corporate booking tool see 20% or more of travel spend booked outside it, and 53% of those name missing content as the main driver. Of the buyers surveyed, 69% said travellers often find flights and hotels on consumer sites that the corporate channel doesn't carry. And 91% said incomplete trip capture hurts their ability to manage duty of care, risk monitoring or policy compliance.

The stakes are larger in APAC. GBTA's August 2026 forecast puts global business-travel spend at a record US$1.71 trillion on about 1.84 billion trips. Its May 2026 Asia Pacific outlook puts APAC, the largest region, at roughly US$700.9 billion, up 10.9% year on year. In APAC, Trip.Biz found 44% of organisations saying cross-regional trips frequently or always require workarounds. For a company booking across several currencies and visa regimes, a few points of leakage on its own travel budget is real money, and the region's spend is growing at 10.9% a year.

The counter-argument, which is half right

Generational analysis is one of the least reliable genres in business writing, and the controls still matter.

I have some sympathy with the obvious objection. Generational claims are routinely overstated. Much of what gets sold as "Gen Z wants X" is a life-stage effect, since junior staff have always had less patience for process they didn't design. Some of it is a technology effect that applies to everyone with a smartphone. The blended-travel figures above make the point: the gradient exists, but Gen X was already at 33% in 2017, so the change is a gradual slope rather than a sudden break.

The second half of the objection is stronger. Managed travel exists for reasons that don't dissolve because expectations changed. Duty of care is a legal obligation in most jurisdictions. Audit trails matter to auditors, and negotiated rates only pay off when bookings land in the programme. GBTA's October 2025 poll shows buyers holding both thoughts: 43% have blended-travel policies, while 59% flag duty-of-care concerns, 55% expense tracking and 46% insurance.

So my read is narrower than the trend-piece version. Expectations have changed, and the need for control has stayed where it was. For a long time a slow booking experience could be defended as the price of governance. That defence is weaker now that a booking tool can apply policy inside a fast flow, and a vendor who asks you to choose between the two is describing its own limits.

Where Accomy fits, and a disclosure

I'm not a neutral party here, so the commercial interest belongs in plain view.

This is the gap Accomy is built for, and I have a commercial interest in that argument being true. Price caps by grade apply while you book, so nobody discovers the rule in a rejected claim. Flights come from GDS/NDC plus direct airline content, and hotels from negotiated rates, so the trip lands inside the programme rather than beside it. Payment works across currencies, and the iOS and Android apps let travellers book from their phone. When something goes wrong, a human desk answers on WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, web chat, email and phone. Take the pitch with appropriate scepticism, and apply the same test to whoever you're evaluating, us included.

Rethinking how your team books travel? Book a 30-min walkthrough

What to change on Monday

Three changes a travel programme can make without waiting for a new tool.

Start with the policy document. Take the three rules travellers break most often, such as hotel caps by city, cabin class by flight length and the approval threshold, and put them where people book rather than in a PDF. Then time your approval loop. If a routine regional trip takes more than a working day to approve, decide which trips inside the caps can skip approval altogether. Finally, test the support path from the traveller's side by messaging your own travel desk or agency with a real change request, and see how long a person takes to answer.

None of this changes what business travel is for. People still need to be in rooms with other people, and someone still needs to know where they are and what it cost. What has changed is that the process now has to be about as fast and as clear as the consumer equivalent, because the people using it carry that alternative in their pocket.

Related reading

Frequently Asked Questions

What do Gen Z employees expect from business travel?

Mostly what every traveller wants, with less patience for slow process. Gen Z is keen to travel for work: SAP Concur's 2025 survey of 3,750 business travellers found 98% of Gen Z respondents willing. Three expectations stand out. They want to book for themselves and get an answer the same day. They want the travel policy visible while they book, rather than enforced weeks later on an expense claim. And they want to look things up first, with a person available when a trip goes wrong. None of these is unique to Gen Z, but this cohort is quicker to route around a process that fails them.

Are younger employees really changing corporate travel, or is that a trend claim?

Both. The demographic shift is real: Deloitte's 2025 survey of 23,482 people across 44 countries puts Gen Z and millennials at roughly two-thirds of the labour force within a few years. But many individual "Gen Z wants X" claims are overstated, and often reflect life stage or smartphone use rather than generation. The 2017 GBTA Foundation and Hilton study already showed a generational gradient in blended travel, so the change is gradual. The defensible version is narrower: expectations formed in consumer apps are now applied to work tools, and travellers route around friction instead of tolerating it.

Does out-of-policy booking mean employees are being non-compliant?

Often not. Trip.Biz's June 2026 survey of corporate travel buyers looked at companies with 20% or more of travel spend booked outside the approved tool. Among those, 53% name missing content as the main driver. Of all the buyers surveyed, 69% say travellers often find flights and hotels on consumer sites that the corporate channel doesn't carry. Treating that as a discipline problem rather than a content and friction problem tends to make it worse, because the next booking moves further outside the programme.

Do duty of care and negotiated rates still matter if travellers want self-service?

Yes, and arguably more. GBTA's October 2025 poll of 591 respondents found 43% have adopted blended-travel policies, while 59% flagged duty of care, 55% expense tracking and 46% insurance as concerns. Self-service without trip capture is the worst outcome: the trip happens, but nobody can see where the traveller is or what it cost. The goal is self-service inside the programme, with policy applied at booking, so the traveller gets speed and the company keeps its view of every trip.

About Accomy: Accomy is the network that powers corporate travel for APAC SMEs and for the independent travel businesses that plug into the same rails. It offers GDS/NDC and direct airline content, negotiated hotel rates, price caps by grade, multi-currency payment, iOS and Android apps, and a human desk on WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, web chat, email and phone.

Related reading:

Sources (checked 21 October 2026)

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