Business Travel Had Been Going Strong. Can it Shake Off Recent Weakness?

Business travel showed double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2025, and forward bookings remain strong despite a drop in early April, according to booking data shared with Skift by two leading travel management platforms.

For the three months through March, corporate flight reservations surged 13% year-over-year and hotel bookings rose 9%, according to Navan. March alone was particularly strong, with both flight and hotel bookings jumping 19% compared to the same month a year earlier.

However, in April so far, both flight and hotel bookings through Navan were down 9% from the same period last year.

Still, it’s unclear if the recent weakness will persist. “It’s too early to draw conclusions. Companies could have simply front-loaded a portion of bookings,” said Rich Liu, CEO of Travel at Navan.

Forward bookings made in March for future travel dates were up 16% compared to the same period last year, suggesting continued confidence in business travel needs for the remainder of 2025.

On Wednesday, Delta President Glen Hauenstein said business travel trends are “choppy” and that “corporate volumes [are] expected to be flattish” versus last year’s.

No Weakness in European Inbound Yet

Skift asked Travelperk, a travel management platform based in Barcelona, if it was seeing any of its 7,000 clients reduce travel to the U.S. in light of geopolitical and economic tensions with the U.S. and changes to enforcement of U.S. border rules.

“At present, we are not seeing any impact on travel to or from the U.S. versus the same period last year,” said Jean-Christophe Taunay Bucalo, president and chief operating officer.

“We’re closely monitoring it and actually seeing a 36% year-over-year growth in U.S. outbound travel,” Taunay Bucalo said.

Travelperk looked at return flight bookings in the past four weeks, and filtered them to the same cohort of companies as in the year-earlier period. It has a large sample size, given that it processed over $2.5 billion in business travel bookings last year.

However, Taunay Bucalo declined to talk about the potential U.S. tariff impact on future transatlantic business travel bookings as the company is still monitoring trends.

U.S. Business Travel: Mixed Signals

Among Navan’s clients, most segments showed gains in the first quarter. “The strongest growth is coming from enterprise customers, whose flight bookings increased 34% year-over-year in March,” Liu said.

“Mid-market companies followed with 18% growth, while small business bookings showed more modest 2% growth,” he said.

Navan’s mix of customers has historically skewed toward small-to-mid-size companies, but it has recently increased its share of large enterprises, such as Salesforce and Netflix.

Among industry sectors, real estate was the only major one showing significant contraction, with bookings down 10% compared to March 2024.

Canadian Business Travel to the U.S.

Skift also asked Navan to share data on trends in cross-border business travel from Canada.

Flight bookings soared 25% year-over-year for the January through early April period, according to Navan’s analysis of bookings across a subset of its clients. Hotel bookings for these travelers were up 10% compared to the same timeframe.

Tech hubs and business centers are the primary beneficiaries of this Canadian corporate travel surge. Austin has seen the most dramatic increase with Canadian business visitors up 102%, while Seattle (+71%), Los Angeles (+58%), and Dallas (+53%) also recorded substantial gains.

But there may be some softness buried in the data to watch.

For Canadian travelers to the U.S., April numbers remain positive for flights but at a lower growth trend (+5%) and hotel bookings showed a slight decline (-4%).