Employee Travel Program Trends in 2026: Key Changes and Expectations

Business travel programs are adapting to new employee expectations around trip flexibility and work location. According to Deloitte's 2024 corporate travel study, two-thirds of business travelers extended trips for leisure purposes in 2023, creating operational challenges for companies managing expenses, duty of care, and policy compliance through informal arrangements.​

Companies are responding by formalizing bleisure policies, upgrading booking technology to handle blended itineraries, and treating travel programs as employee well-being investments rather than pure cost centers. The shift reflects broader changes in how employees work—with remote work capabilities enabling longer trips that combine business obligations with personal time in the same destination.

This guide covers the operational changes travel managers are implementing, the technology infrastructure that supports blended travel, and practical steps for updating policies that match how employees actually travel in 2026.

1. Bleisure Is Moving from "Ask Your Manager" to Real Policy

For years, bleisure operated in this gray area. Someone would ask their manager if they could stay the weekend after a business trip, get a casual "sure, just pay for the extra nights yourself" in email, and then finance would figure out expense splitting on the fly. That worked fine when it happened twice a year.

It doesn't work when half your team wants to do it. More companies are writing actual bleisure policies that answer the questions employees and finance teams actually have: Who pays for what? What happens if the weekend flight is cheaper than the weekday one? What if something goes wrong during the personal days?

What Strong Bleisure Policies Include in Business Travel Programs

The best policies we're seeing answer specific questions up front. Common patterns include: Company pays for flights and the nights you need for business. You cover extra nights and personal meals. If you need wifi the whole time because you're on call, the company covers it. If adding leisure days makes the flight more expensive, you pay the difference.

Duty of care is usually limited to the business days. When you're on your own time, you're responsible for your own safety and insurance. That distinction matters more than you'd think for legal liability.

The approval process should be dead simple—request the extension in the booking tool, your manager clicks approve, the system splits the costs automatically. If people have to send emails and wait for replies, they'll just book around the policy.

Extended-Stay Accommodation for Blended Business Travel

The classic three-day business trip is making room for something new: longer stays where work and travel blend together. Picture this: fly to Denver on Monday, work from the local office Tuesday and Wednesday, meet clients Thursday and Friday, take Friday afternoon off, explore the city over the weekend, and fly home Sunday night.

This isn't the same as traditional business travel. Hotels make sense for two nights, but nobody wants to live out of a hotel room for a week.

Serviced apartments with actual kitchens and dedicated workspaces work better for week-long trips. Your team can cook breakfast instead of eating hotel buffets every morning, spread out for video calls without sitting on the bed, and maintain some sense of routine that makes travel less exhausting.

Consider adding serviced apartments and aparthotels to your booking platform alongside regular hotels. Corporate housing providers and extended-stay brands often run 20-30% cheaper on a weekly basis than the equivalent nightly hotel rate, which helps offset the longer trip.

2. Travel Technology That Supports Bleisure and Expense Control

Extended trips need solid remote work infrastructure. Your people need VPN that doesn't drop constantly, video tools that work on variable wifi, and expense systems that can handle a trip where days 1-3 are business and days 4-7 are personal without making everyone manually split receipts.

Your travel platform needs to handle the complexity: book a week where only part of it is business travel, split the costs automatically, and show everyone—traveler, manager, finance—which days are which.

Managing bleisure manually doesn't scale. The math on flight cost comparisons alone will drive your finance team crazy, let alone tracking which expenses are reimbursable across multi-week trips.

Some modern platforms automate the annoying parts. They calculate what the business-only flight would cost and compare it to the bleisure version, so everyone knows exactly what the employee pays. They build itineraries that clearly show business vs. personal days. They block people from submitting weekend dinner receipts for reimbursement automatically.

Automated Flight Cost Comparison for Bleisure Trips

Here's the biggest pain point: If someone extends Tuesday-Thursday to Monday-Sunday, did adding the weekend make the flight more expensive? Figuring this out manually wastes everyone's time and creates arguments later.

Better platforms show this automatically: "Business flight would be $450, bleisure flight is $380, you owe $0" or "Business flight would be $380, bleisure flight is $520, you pay $140." That transparency kills the back-and-forth.

Expense Tracking That Enforces Travel Policy

Good systems make it crystal clear which days are company-paid business travel (submit those expenses) and which are personal travel (don't even try). The system enforces this automatically instead of making your finance team review every line item on every report to catch mistakes.

3. Building Authentic Local Experiences into Business Travel

When people extend trips, they're not looking for the typical tourist stuff. They want the coffee shop locals actually go to, the running route through the neighborhood, the restaurant that doesn't show up on the first page of Google results.

Some companies are leaning into this by building city guides for their most common destinations. Nothing fancy—just crowdsourced recommendations from employees who travel there regularly. Best coffee for getting work done early. Lunch spots near where people usually have meetings. Neighborhoods worth exploring. Things to do if you're staying through the weekend.

If you're sending a team somewhere together, organizing something that taps into local culture beats another dinner at the hotel restaurant. Food tours, cooking classes, neighborhood walks—stuff that creates shared memories and actually helps the team bond.

These don't cost much (often $50+ per person depending on the city), and they tend to create better connections than the same money spent on drinks at the hotel bar.

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How to Implement Bleisure Policies in Your Travel Program

Start with policy because it costs nothing and provides immediate clarity. Write down what's covered, what isn't, and how approvals work. Get finance, legal, HR, and your frequent travelers involved so you're not missing obvious issues. Test with a pilot group before rolling it out company-wide.

Then evaluate your technology. Does your platform support automated flight comparison, split itineraries, bleisure approval workflows, expense blocking for personal days, and extended-stay bookings? If not, many travel management companies added these features in 2024-2025—confirm your specific setup includes them.

Finally, communicate clearly. Tell people what changed and give concrete examples: "Traveling to Austin for a Thursday-Friday conference? You can now stay through the weekend at your own expense with manager approval." Train managers on the approval process. Give finance guidelines for handling blended expense reports.

Why Dyme Supports Better Business Travel

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