Business travel is back in a big way. But for many small and midsize businesses (SMBs), managing it has quietly become one of the most frustrating—and time-consuming—parts of running the company.
It’s not necessarily because trips cost more, though the current rise in oil prices is impacting prices. According to new BILL Spend & Expense data, the average cost per business travel transaction has remained relatively stable over the past three years. What’s changed is volume. Businesses are simply traveling more.
Business Travel Is Growing Again
In fact, BILL reports that average annual travel spend per business jumped from $40,900 in 2022 to $60,700 in 2025, yet the average cost per travel transaction has stayed roughly the same, actually ticked down from $184.70 in 2022 to $183.26 in 2025.
That means more bookings. More receipts. More approvals. More reconciliation. And for already-stretched finance teams, more opportunities for things to slip through the cracks. And more mistakes to be made.
Why Travel Spending Becomes So Hard to Manage
Travel has long been one of the least controlled areas of business spending. Employees often book flights or hotels outside approved systems, policies are buried somewhere on an internal company site, and finance teams end up sorting everything out after the fact. By then, the money has already been spent.
And as economic uncertainty continues, that’s becoming a bigger issue.
Small businesses are watching expenses more carefully right now. Margins remain tight, operational efficiency matters more than ever, and owners want better visibility into where money is going in real time—not weeks later during expense reconciliation.
Bringing Travel Into the Financial Workflow
That’s why BILL’s new BILL Travel platform caught my attention.
BILL Travel, built directly into BILL Spend & Expense, is designed to bring booking, expense management, policy controls, and reconciliation into a single, connected workflow. Instead of layering travel onto disconnected systems, the goal is to make travel part of the broader financial operations process from the beginning.
The platform allows businesses to book travel with more than 500 airlines and 1.5 million hotels, integrating spending directly into the same system companies already use to manage budgets, cards, and expenses. BILL says the system can reduce time spent across travel workflows by more than 85%.
What I think makes this interesting isn’t just the booking capability—it’s the operational control.
One of the biggest frustrations for finance teams is dealing with out-of-policy spending after the fact. BILL Travel surfaces company policy at the point of booking, not during reconciliation weeks later. Transactions and receipts are automatically captured and coded, giving finance teams visibility into travel spending in real time.
That matters because travel spending has become far more strategic for many SMBs.
Eliminating Administrative Complexity
Businesses are traveling to expand into new markets, meet with clients, attend conferences, and strengthen distributed teams. Research cited by BILL suggests smaller businesses may actually be showing greater resilience in business travel than larger companies.
At the same time, every additional trip adds administrative complexity.
For accounting firms working with SMB clients, travel management can create a surprising amount of cleanup work. Missing receipts, disconnected systems, and manual reconciliation all consume time that could be spent on higher-value advisory services instead.
BILL says customers using the platform have already automated up to 70% of travel expense tracking and reporting.
Another factor worth noting is how much BILL continues to lean into AI and automation across its platform. The company’s Transaction Agent uses AI to automate receipt capture, matching, and coding—including travel-related receipts, which are often among the most tedious expenses to process manually.
This isn’t really about making business travel glamorous or easier to book. It’s about recognizing that travel has become a much larger operational and financial category for growing businesses—and that most small companies still manage it through a patchwork of disconnected systems.
As SMBs continue to balance growth opportunities with tighter operational discipline, tools that provide better visibility and control over spending—including increased travel—are becoming increasingly valuable.
Rieva Lesonsky is the founder of Small Business Currents, a content company focusing on small businesses and entrepreneurship. You can find her on Twitter @Rieva, Bluesky @Rieva.bsky.social, and LinkedIn. Or email her at Rieva@SmallBusinessCurrents.com.
Photo courtesy Andrej Lišakov for Unsplash+
