Interviews done from Oct. 4 to Oct. 12, 2017, by cash-back app Dosh of 500 U.S. residents who travel for work at least once a month found that 47 percent ate at less expensive restaurants than the average business traveler, 43
percent opted out of room service, 42 percent searched for cheaper itineraries like weekday flights rather than weekend travel,
28 percent changed travel dates to get better rates and 16 percent entertained
clients at less expensive places than the average respondent. Moreover,
the survey found that 25 percent did not expense items that cost between $11 and $20, even though 60 percent of
these items were legitimate business travel expenses.
Getting Personal
Survey
respondents reported spending plenty of their own money on personal travel
expenses while traveling on behalf of their employers. Forty percent spent
between $100 and $400 on personal travel expenses per trip, and 15 percent
spent between $400 and $600. Younger travelers tended to spend the most, with Millennials
reporting personal travel expenses between $400 and $1,000 per trip, which may
point to the trend among this group of adding leisure days to business trips. A
recent
Global Business Travel Association report showed nearly half of Millennial
business travelers added a leisure component to their business trips at least
once in a 12-month period.
Clarification, April 3, 2018, 4:20 p.m. Eastern: BTN updated this story to clarify that the percentages in the first paragraph compare interview sources to the average results across Dosh's survey.