Five critical mistakes that Hungarian companies still make when it comes to business travel

The first is the improperly managed travel policy. The attitude is common in domestic companies: “Our colleagues book responsibly.” In reality, this means that everyone decides differently: who for price, who for timing, who for the usual service provider. In the absence of automatic policy limits, huge variance develops in both price and process. International practice, on the other hand, increasingly relies on binding rules built into the platform, which standardizes operations and reduces risks.

The second mistake is that reservations are completely decentralized. It happens that three colleagues traveling for a project book three tickets at different prices for the same flight – and this is by no means an exception. The scattered reservation process is expensive, slow, and in the event of a flight cancellation, the company does not even know who is where. Reservations channeled into a central system could easily bring savings of 10–20 percent in Hungary.

The third problem is that travel budgets almost formally do not exist in many places. Travel is often a “we’ll see how much it costs” category – until a painful cost shock occurs at the end of the year. The lack of project- or cost center-level budgeting and real-time cost monitoring makes planning and control difficult.

The fourth recurring difficulty is the fragmentation of travel data. In many companies, the finance or HR department still tries to reconstruct how much the company spent on travel in a given quarter from Excel spreadsheets, emails, and invoice attachments. Reporting is slow, error-prone, and insufficient from an audit and ESG perspective. In contrast, real-time, structured, API-based data provision is already a basic expectation for Western European companies.

The fifth and perhaps most costly mistake is the high rate of last-minute bookings. Hungarian companies are buying an exceptionally high number of tickets within 48 hours of departure, while this is on average nearly fifty percent more expensive. The phenomenon is not just due to procrastination: the fragmented approval process is often simply too slow. International companies are therefore assigning a performance indicator to early bookings and setting a goal to make purchases at least two weeks in advance as much as possible.

Business travel is the third largest expense item for many companies. However, the savings potential is significant: a unified, automated travel management system not only saves money, but also ensures predictable cost planning, faster administration and a better employee experience.

The end-of-year planning period is an ideal opportunity for domestic companies to open a new chapter in their business travel practices. More efficient processes do not mean more rules, but smarter operations: with less administration, more transparent decisions and more responsible data management. Those actors who act now can build on the saved costs in 2026.