SAP Concur reveals business travel trends for 2025

SAP Concur has released its travel and expense predictions for 2025, highlighting key trends the company expects to shape the future of business travel management.

The first prediction focuses on a continued investment in digital systems and security infrastructure. As companies expand their digital capabilities and adopt innovations such as process automation and generative AI to support growth, they face increased risks related to data and system breaches.

"Today, more organisations than ever experience cybersecurity breaches, putting personal information at risk. It's a delicate balancing act to respond quickly to the demands of internal and external stakeholders without disregarding security concerns," says the company. In 2025, firms are expected to prioritise investment in technology and security infrastructure to provide greater customer value while minimising risk.

The second trend suggests a return to the office will increase business travel volume, necessitating more efficient budget management. With inflation slowing, businesses can derive more value from travel investments. There is mounting pressure on financial controllers to optimise travel and expense budgets.

Brett Wheeldon, VP of Solutions Consulting, APAC, SAP Concur, said, "From 2020-2023, circumstances led to dramatically reduced travel activity, and companies experienced benefits to their bottom line. Corporate travel is now recovering strongly—according to GBTA, the global business travel industry spending is expected to hit a record $1.48 trillion this year, with China and the US the two fastest growing markets." 

Thirdly, SAP Concur predicts that expense reports will transform into exception reports by 2025. With the increased automation of tasks such as transaction validation, many transactions will be considered "trusted" and will not require individual reports. Instead, exception reports will flag deviations from standard travel and expense policies.

There is a predicted healthy scepticism among employees towards AI. "While 2024 promised AI-literate businesses a host of transformative benefits, 2025 will see the tech treated with a sensible level of scepticism and thoughtfulness." According to the company's survey, 95% of business travellers would consider using AI-powered automation to support their tasks. Still, AI will primarily assist with recommendations and anomaly detection rather than completely replacing human decision-making in travel booking or expense reporting.

Wheeldon explained, "Travel booking is the perfect use case to move away from static cumbersome input forms to a natural language conversation that has the datasets to access information such as corporate travel policies, specific event dates and even travellers' record of travel that may alter policy rules based on frequency of travel."

The final prediction relates to the growing demand for improved user experiences. As business travel rises, employee expectations for support will increase. This includes demands for real-time updates on travel disruptions and greater levels of support from travel and expense systems due to factors like extreme weather and geopolitical changes.

Wheeldon added, "Of course, that aggregated T&E data also provides insight into other areas APAC businesses are becoming more and more focused on, for example, what is the organisation's travel program's carbon footprint, and does the organisation have the tools to reduce that footprint?" Organisations must leverage new T&E investments effectively while being mindful of security and data protection.