The last time Airlines Reporting Corp. reported a year-over-year increase in the number of corporate trips the company counted for a single month was in December 2024. Those trips—specifically, those sold by U.S. travel agencies with at least 70 percent self-reported corporate and government business and settled by ARC—have been in the red year over year ever since, ranging from a monthly dip of less than 0.5 percent to a drop of 8 percent. The most recently reported decline, in August, was 6.4 percent.
From February through spring and into early summer, those drops could make sense, given how uncertain the environment was with talk of tariffs, slow job growth and persistent inflation. Yet, airline executives from all four of the largest U.S. carriers—American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines—at a September Morgan Stanley financial conference touted the rebound of business travel after the lull earlier in the year.
Delta president Glen Hauenstein said the carrier was seeing "very strong corporate demand into the fall," and even noted the airline had its "highest post-pandemic corporate sales number for any day and any week in September."
What actually is happening?
One possibly obvious answer is that ARC and the airlines are measuring different things, with ARC's figure on the number of trips and airlines likely touting dollar volume. BTN reached out to multiple carriers to clarify how they measure corporate trips, but each declined an interview.
ARC, however, shared that in addition to counting trips booked with corporate-focused travel management companies, it looks at other factors.
"We look at things like length of stay, advance purchase, the number of travelers in a [passenger name record], whether it was booked with a corporate contract," ARC managing director of data science and research Chuck Thackston said. "We have a mix of statistics that we use to try to triangulate on the best representation of what's going on in the corporate market. We've refined that quite a bit over the last several years, especially as things recovered post-pandemic."
What ARC may not include in its corporate numbers, though, are blended trips—part business and part leisure—and those have been on the rise in recent years, especially since the pandemic ushered in the increased ability to work remotely.
"There are some that are just so blurry that we don't count them within a corporate or within a leisure criteria," Thackston said. "It's just a trip."
Thackston added that ARC has seen a softening in the corporate market for macroeconomic reasons, including softer employment trends and interest rate uncertainty.
"The other thing we're noticing is a little bit more softening of short trips," such as one-day trips for a single meeting, he said. "Ten years ago, that happened all the time. … Through the pandemic, there was a lot of new technology and the ability to do some of these short meetings virtually." But longer trips and international trips are "still holding their own."
Direct Booking Increases
Another factor to consider is potential channel shift away from EDIFACT-enabled channels and toward offering New Distribution Capability content, including direct connections with airlines. Some suppliers enabling booking of NDC fares include Navan, Spotnana, TravelPerk and Blockskye. Navan in June even switched off NDC content offered through global distribution systems. Those direct corporate bookings aren't necessarily counted by ARC.
And Blockskye has scored two major managed travel accounts: Deloitte, which was No. 2 on BTN's 2025 Corporate Travel 100 list of the largest managed programs, and PwC, which was No. 4. Each books a vast number of trips. Are those programs, by any measure among the very biggest, able to move the needle on ARC's corporate trip numbers, even a percentage point or two? Industry experts declined to speculate.
Online fare consolidators and online travel agencies also could be having an effect. "A lot of travel startups are using [consolidator] Etraveli for air content," Serko VP of business travel development Johnny Thorsen said. "That means those bookings are simply not seen as a traditional corporate travel booking."
Some companies also allow corporate travelers to book in their channel of choice, including directly on an airline's website or mobile app. Corporations that use third-party suppliers, such as Traxo, or suppliers that use Traverse, can identify those bookings as corporate, since the traveler is asked at the time of booking whether the trip is for business or leisure.
There also are airline programs designed for small and midsize companies, for which booking direct may be required, or if not required, made appealing.
"Airlines are building more and more capabilities in their own direct channels that make it enticing for companies, especially smaller ones … that don't want to pay a booking fee," a former airline executive told BTN, giving an example of a company based in a city with only one or two airline choices. "Why not book on their website? … I might as well book [direct] and get the best discount I can. They've figured out duty of care, my reporting is working. I think a lot of small companies are saying, 'Why not?' But if you truly need to shop multiple different airlines for your program, you still need a TMC online booking tool-type solution, and NDC offers the best content in that scenario."
But what about leakage? Rogue bookings outside of company-approved channels might not show up in counts of corporate trips.
Results Plus Consulting founder Louise Miller said her consultancy has conducted research that shows a good average for air leakage is 10 percent of all bookings going to channels where no one can identify them as corporate. "That's a lot," she said, especially for programs totaling millions of dollars.
"We see that loyalty is a big driver of the decision that travelers make when they have freedom of choice of channel, and it's not just the points—it's all the conveniences," she said. "Ten years ago, maybe travelers were a little more likely to be compliant because they were told that's what the company preferred them to do," but now, the loyalty programs are more rich and have more effect on the traveler experience.
Is Less Travel Really Happening?
Maybe both scenarios can be true at the same time: the number of corporate trips is down while airlines are seeing increased revenue from the corporate segment, thanks to higher fares.
On Delta's recent third-quarter earnings call, Hauenstein noted that while corporate revenue slightly exceeded 2019 levels, the percentages of business travel passengers booking compared with pre-pandemic levels still is in the high 70s. But that does not indicate whether the number of corporate trips for Delta has been going up, down, or staying steady recently.
It may be a little of all three.
Thorsen said he has heard that the very large corporates are reducing their number of trips. Likewise, GoldSpring Consulting partner Will Tate also noted that a couple of his large clients out of more than 35 in total were down about 30 percent year over year on the number of trips booked. However, most other clients reviewed showed that they were up "very slightly" or "slightly," about 3 percent to 5 percent, he said.
Miller added that some of the extra-large accounts, in certain verticals, there is less travel in 2025 year over year. "I would call the top 200 accounts in the world are down, not up," she said. "The second thing is the unmanaged market, which we can't even identify very well, but I would guess that segment is up, especially because so many trips in that segment are bleisure trips. … Then there is travel in the middle, SME, which is not the top 200 accounts, but still managed. That is probably flat."
Miller estimated year-to-date travel at large accounts might be down 10 percent year over year, even though "a lot of them are reporting 20 percent, 30 percent down through their TMCs," she said. "But they might not be down quite that far. They have leakage."