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SQUAKE’s ITB Pulse: Key Business Travel Trends from ITB Berlin
Industry leaders share where business travel is heading. Insights from ITB Berlin on AI, sustainability, collaboration, and the future of corporate travel.
Business Travel Show Europe 2026 brought together suppliers, TMCs, tech platforms, and travel buyers from across the industry. On the show floor and in back-to-back conversations, one thing was clear:
Business travel is being reshaped from every direction at once: technology, cost, geopolitics, and traveler expectations are all moving simultaneously.
To capture the mood of the show, we asked a group of leaders across the business travel ecosystem four questions:
Here is SQUAKE's BTS Pulse, based on the perspectives we gathered on the ground.
This article draws on perspectives from:
AI was the one topic nobody could avoid at BTS, but the conversation has matured well past the buzzword stage.
Graeme Milne, Cytric, summed up the question everyone is actually asking:
"The biggest question about AI is where it's living and making a difference already,
versus where it could make a difference. We're already seeing individual use cases:
simple bookings handled by conversational AI, expense audits done by AI. It is
happening, and it's beginning to move forward."
Keesup Choe, CEO of PredictX, put it even more plainly:
"It's not hype, it's just early. Every area of every company is being transformed. There's zero chance travel will be the one area that's unaffected, some supplier solutions haven't matured yet, but it's coming."
Ian Patmore, VP of Product at PredictX, sees the shift showing up in how people access information:
"Chat interfaces are everywhere, and the content behind them is useful, you get answers much faster than before. We're hearing the phrase 'the dashboard is dead, long live the dashboard,' because people are getting more comfortable asking an LLM a question and making a decision, rather than trawling through an offline report that's already out of date."
Sandra Lévy, Navan, drew the sharpest distinction of the day:
"It is not hype, but there's an important distinction between being AI-native and tacking AI onto a legacy platform. True tech leadership isn't measured by the complexity of your algorithms, it's measured by your ability to simplify the lives of travelers. AI doesn't replace the human element of travel, it makes it more scalable."
Beyond technology, external shocks are dictating what travel programs need to do right now.
Ian Patmore pointed to a recent, concrete example:
"When conflict broke out in the Middle East, the ability to locate your travelers fast, historically difficult because data was disconnected, was much easier. That connectivity is making the biggest difference right now."
Sandra Lévy described the same pressure from the visibility side:
"Between geopolitical shifts and extreme weather events, it's more important than ever for companies to have real-time control and visibility over their people. When a crisis hits, travel managers need a quick overview of where their employees are, to check in and adjust itineraries if needed."
Cost is compounding the pressure. Ron Fishman sees it directly in flight search data:
"The most notorious trend is much more expensive flights overall. Companies seem concerned about it across all industries, and for many it’s the second largest cost after staff."
He also hears it from the travel managers he talks to on-site:
"When it comes to cost, the lever they're often given is just 'travel less.' They've shown interest in options to manage costs without reducing travel, because travel remains an important part of running their businesses."
Across nearly every conversation, one theme kept resurfacing: travel managers are tired of firefighting and want the mandate to be strategic.
Graeme Milne hears this constantly:
"It's about how we relieve the stress of the travel manager role, the firefighting, being reactive instead of proactive. Most of the travel managers I talk to are still bogged down by tasks that should and could be handled by AI. They want to be more strategic, more important to their company, and to help their company realize the value of the travel program, but to do that, they need help."
He also sees the upside once that shift happens:
"It's enabling travel managers to get rid of some of the menial tasks and be more strategic around their program, which elevates the role, and elevates business travel within the organization, so it's seen as an investment rather than a cost. Everybody wins."
Sandra Lévy frames it as a battle against friction and manual admin:
"Travel managers and buyers are eager to get out of the weeds of manual admin. One of their biggest pain points is lacking a real-time, centralized dashboard. With AI-driven reporting, it's no longer just about showing you the spend, it can hand you an action plan to optimize cost savings."
Keesup Choe sees it as travel managers redefining the job itself:
"Travel managers want a more holistic experience for their users, while keeping it as cost-effective as possible given the inflation we're seeing in travel right now. Everybody wants to re-examine what true managed travel actually is."
Where the industry once ran on a handful of end-to-end providers, leaders described a landscape that has multiplied, and now needs to be stitched back together.
Florian Gutzmer, S4BT, described the shift bluntly:
"It's more of an API landscape now. Ten years ago there was one solution, you only needed one provider. Now you have thousands of providers, and clients take one piece from everywhere and expect it all to connect perfectly. Younger travelers don't want to hear 'TMC,' they want to use the systems they already know from their private life, adapted for business travel."
Graeme Milne sees the industry responding through consolidation and alliances:
"There's definitely more partnerships and alliances happening, the two biggest TMCs coming together was obviously a buyout, but there are other alliances forming between tech providers and TMCs too. More organizations are realizing you can't do this alone, partnership is how you service the customer better."
Ian Patmore ties this back to the value of connected data:
"More companies are using different agents and connected platforms to manage their programs more efficiently. With that extra connectivity, you're closer to the data, closer to personalizing for travelers, and able to manage your program proactively instead of reactively."
Alongside AI, cost, and fragmentation, sustainability came up as an area where intent is strong, but tools haven't caught up.
Sandra Lévy put it directly:
"We're increasingly seeing companies look for sustainable, localized travel options. It's crucial to give people clear overviews of their climate impact, with a unique and harmonized calculation method, so they can control their environmental footprint and manage their sustainability targets."
That call for a harmonized way to calculate and compare climate impact is one of the clearest throughlines from BTS Europe this year: travel managers don't just want more data, they want data they can trust and act on consistently across every supplier and trip type.
And amid all the talk of automation, cost, and connectivity, it's worth remembering why any of this matters in the first place: it's incredible how powerful business travel still is. A single trip can build trust with a client, close a deal, or align a team in a way no video call replicates, and a year later, people still remember it. That's the power of travel.
1. AI is graduating from hype to line items.
Conversational bookings, automated expense audits, and AI-generated action plans are already live. The gap now is between companies that are AI-native and those bolting AI onto legacy platforms.
2. Geopolitical and cost volatility demand real-time visibility.
From locating travelers during a crisis to managing travel as the second-largest cost after headcount, programs need faster, more connected data.
3. Travel managers are done firefighting.
The recurring ask across nearly every conversation was the same: fewer manual, reactive tasks, more room to operate strategically.
4. Fragmentation is driving partnerships, not paralysis.
With thousands of providers now in play, connectivity, APIs, and alliances between TMCs and tech platforms are becoming the norm.
5. Sustainability needs harmonized measurement to be actionable.
Interest in sustainable, localized travel is real, but it depends on climate impact data that is consistent and comparable across the entire program.
For travel managers, the challenge on display at BTS Europe wasn't a lack of ambition, it was a lack of connected, trustworthy data to act on. Managing a travel program today means balancing cost, duty of care, and environmental impact simultaneously, often across dozens of disconnected suppliers and systems.
SQUAKE helps companies build sustainable travel programs that work financially, operationally, and ecologically, enabling emission calculations with a harmonized methodology across travel and mobility types, and climate contribution options that plug directly into existing booking and travel management workflows.
Because as more than one leader told us at BTS: the goal isn't another dashboard, it's the ability to actually act on what the data shows.
Interested in discussing how sustainability is evolving across the travel ecosystem? Get in touch with Team SQUAKE.
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