How Can Corporate Travel Management Shift

For many businesses, managing corporate travel is no longer just about booking trips. It is increasingly about coordinating a growing number of moving parts.

Travel now cuts across multiple teams, suppliers and systems from flights and accommodation to approvals, payments and reporting, all under increasing pressure to manage spend more closely.

What was once handled through shared cards, manual processes and post trip reconciliation is becoming harder to manage as travel activity scales. Bookings are made across different platforms, spend happens at different points in the journey, and reconciliation takes place later once invoices, receipts and approvals have been aligned.

The result is not a single problem, but a series of gaps between otherwise connected processes.

Globally, businesses are starting to rethink how the full travel workflow fits together. The shift is towards more connected approaches where booking, spend and reporting are aligned from the start, rather than managed separately at each stage. Virtual card capabilities are gaining traction in this context, not as a standalone payment tool, but as a way to link spend directly to individual travel transactions and bring more structure into the process.

In practical terms, this means that when a flight or hotel booking is made, a dedicated payment can be created for that transaction, with defined parameters such as spending limits, merchant categories or validity periods. Instead of reviewing spend after travel has taken place, businesses can apply control at the point of booking, reducing the need for manual intervention later.

For finance teams, the priority is not only visibility, but consistency. This includes understanding how travel spend is applied across bookings, how it aligns to internal policy, and how it can be tracked across teams and growing volumes of transactions. As travel activity increases, maintaining that consistency becomes more difficult where processes remain fragmented.

Capturing transaction data earlier in the journey starts to address this. Where data is linked to each booking upfront, it carries through into reporting and reconciliation, reducing the need to manually match transactions after the fact. For businesses managing more complex travel environments, this provides a more reliable view of spend and supports better cost management over time.

These dynamics are increasingly evident in the South African context, where businesses are operating under tighter cost controls and greater scrutiny on discretionary spend such as travel.

The administrative burden linked to travel remains significant, often spread across finance, procurement and travel management teams, particularly where systems do not integrate and processes rely on manual follow up.

“Businesses are under increasing pressure to manage spend more precisely, but also to remove the operational friction that sits behind it,” says Senzo Nsibande, CEO of FNB Core Banking, Retail and Business Banking. “In areas like corporate travel, the complexity is not just in the payment itself, but in how that spend connects to bookings, approvals and reporting. The opportunity is to simplify that process while strengthening control, so that teams can focus less on administration and more on decision making.”

For travel management companies and suppliers, a more structured approach can reduce friction in booking and settlement, while improving certainty around how and when they are paid. In higher volume environments, where multiple bookings are processed daily, this can help reduce discrepancies and improve back end efficiency.

As these approaches become more widely adopted, the focus is likely to shift away from tracking travel spend after the journey towards managing it with greater clarity upfront.

Having access to these capabilities at a predictable monthly cost supports this shift, allowing businesses to embed stronger controls into everyday processes rather than treating them as an additional administrative layer.

For businesses, this creates a more practical way to manage the complexity of corporate travel, while aligning spend more closely with broader financial controls and governance requirements.

By Senzo Nsibande, CEO of FNB Core Banking, Retail and Business Banking