Revisiting the 2025 Outlook
Looking back at our 2025 Outlook published in December last year, pricing forecasts that predicted moderate rate rises, albeit in a “fragile” environment, were right on the money. But no one could have foreseen the impact that newly-imposed US trade tariffs would have on travel and on business confidence more broadly.
However, GBTA’s Catherine Logan correctly pointed to the growing importance of trip value and travelling “smarter”– even if this was driven by cost savings rather than environmental concerns, as Logan had expected. Hopes that 2025 would be “the year of sustainability action in business travel”, as consultant Sally Higgs put it, were somewhat thwarted when the EU put climate regulation, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, on the back burner to focus instead on reducing regulatory red tape and improving the bloc’s “competitiveness”.
A flurry of TMC M&A activity in 2025 – including the completion of American Express Global Business Travel’s $540 million acquisition of rival CWT – proved Take2Eton Group CEO James Parkhouse’s prediction that M&As would multiply. “This is being driven primarily by the need for these TMCs to remain competitive, to navigate the increased complexity in managing travel, to invest in new technology, and to combat increased operational costs,” he said. Further consolidation was also witnessed across the broader supplier landscape, particularly in Europe’s aviation sector. This looks set to continue in 2026.
Other contributors highlighted the potential of generative AI to drive efficiencies in travel management and “revolutionise” trip planning. PredictX CEO Keesup Choe rightly described AI Agents as “the biggest and most exciting development in terms of using AI in business travel”. Amadeus Cytric chief commercial officer Mark Cullen also predicted: “We are coming into a world where travel and expense solutions will execute tasks in the background and interact with users at the right time, in an intelligent way.”
Tripstax CEO Jack Ramsey predicted “material leaps” in improvements to user interfaces and experiences (UI/UX), and in 2025 corporate behemoths like Deloitte and GE Heathcare, in fact, traded legacy TMC partners for tech-savvy new entrants Blockskye and Navan, respectively, in an effort to improve traveller experience.
None of last year’s contributions anticipated the extent to which an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment would impact travel management. In addition to trade tariffs, regions of armed conflict and social unrest and an uptick in cyber attacks put travel risk management front and centre in 2025.
Read on to discover what our contributors predict for 2026, followed by key industry price forecasts for the upcoming year.