Group travel has been a big part of business travel and while remote work and virtual meetings have become more popular recently, group travel will maintain its relevance. In the past several years, new patterns are emerging around group travel. One of these patterns is groups of 10 to 20 colleagues travelling more often and for longer periods to engage and develop deeper professional relationships. While many enjoy the work-life balance of remote and virtual work, meeting in person with your teams and colleagues is key to developing deeper working relationships and driving innovation.

Analysing Egencia’s air travel data for the last five years, we found almost half of the air trips taken had two or more travellers with similar itineraries.^[1] Group travel is a big share of corporate travel, but it is challenging to organise, manage and track. By talking to our travellers and running focus groups with travel managers, we identified two key pain points: tracking who has booked, and coordinating air travel bookings with invitees. Many teams travel quarterly or more and end up relying on email, messaging tools and spreadsheets to manage group travel. Plus, someone has to take on the admin which adds to their already busy schedule and grows their “things to do” list.

However, colleagues and teams travel together because face-to-face contact is an essential part of building strong professional relationships within the company and with your customers. Your company’s culture needs your employees to meet and share ideas outside a computer screen while having lunch, grabbing a coffee or walking past the water cooler.

Most group travel is between two to 50 colleagues and needs someone to get the planning started, with key features to keep everyone on the same page while letting attendees manage their own booking process.

To help simplify organising, managing and tracking team travel, we launched “Group Trips.”

With “Group Trips”, anyone with an Egencia profile can organise a group trip, invite up to 50 colleagues, set the date, location, agenda, and track progress. Invitees are notified via email and then book their own air travel. Everyone invited has visibility of who else is joining and if they have booked their air travel. This transparency provides the basic information everyone needs therefore freeing up admin time. You can even invite company guests.

You can assign additional organiser roles to help manage larger groups and travel managers have visibility of all group trips for their company and can access them to mitigate any issues. Plus, all “Group Trips” travel data is available in our reporting tools to view and download for further analysis.

“Group Trips” simplifies group travel so everyone in your company can easily organise, manage, and track team travel.

^{[1] Amex GBT Egencia internal reporting, January 2024.}