Business Travel 2026: Why enterprises need smarter global connectivity solutions

Having been shut down completely by COVID-19, the engine of corporate travel has been fully reignited by Q4 2025. It’s the same underwhelming lukewarm breakfast buffet, but there are now entirely new mechanisms and technologies powering the process – and the old ways of connecting with teams in the field are no longer up to the job.   

The trends for 2026 show that global business has done more than just recover. According to research published by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), spending already returned to €1.3 trillion in 2025, and is projected to exceed €1.5 trillion in 2026 and maintain an annual growth of as much as 8% through 2030. 

However, any Team Lead trying to reboot the same strategies that were working in 2019 will immediately find that the 2026 landscape is defined by new behaviors, new risks, and a complex new set of demands that render traditional connectivity models obsolete.  

The heavily equipped "road warrior" of the past has been replaced by a hybrid and agile professional that’s light on hardware but intensive on data. Many otherwise sophisticated enterprises that dusted off their old travel packages are now struggling to deal with the fallout.    

The advent of remote work has permanently altered employee behavior, even though a full third of companies are futilely trying to put the genie back in the bottle and get all their teams permanently back behind desks.  

Office facility brokerage Hubble publishes a definitive list of major companies’ back-to-office policies, which is a useful way to see which major brands still think it’s 2019. It’s worth noting that of all the businesses pushing to end hybrid work, only about 9% are offering their personnel pecuniary incentives, such as help with childcare. A 2025 survey of around a thousand business leaders showed that the most commonly used Return to Office incentive were ‘social events’. It is as-yet unclear how effective Casual Fridays are going to be in reversing the Fifth Industrial Revolution.  

For the foreseeable future, the dominant model is going to remain hybrid. The same GBTA study showed that more than 60% of digitally engaged companies now contractually enshrine hybrid working into their contracts, and their distributed teams blend virtual collaboration with targeted, essential business travel. The fundamental shift that the New Normal created isn't in the volume of travel, but in its purpose. Travel is no longer as frequent, but it's far more purposeful. Companies are trading low-value, transactional trips for high-value, strategic engagements. 

Corporate travel experts Perk published data showing that since 2023 their bookings for short-haul flights returning the same day had dropped to just 9%, down from 19% in 2019. The accepted reason behind this is that if a meeting can be so succinctly concluded, it's now a video call. The essential trips are those that are strategic, adaptative, multi-focused and have the best case for a ROI.    

These multi-purpose journeys have led to what agencies like Perk call ‘stacked’ travel. A Sales Director doesn't just go to London for a client pitch. They now go to London for a client pitch… and then train to Paris to align with the regional hybrid team… and then fly to Berlin to audit a new supplier... and so on. The GBTA reports that multi-stop itineraries have already increased 16% since 2023.    

As every single business sector and industry knows, moving people around is one of the most complicated and costly things you can do with any of your assets. This complex new travel paradigm creates a connectivity challenge that most IT and finance departments are only now beginning to grasp the full scope of.  

In the Good Old Days before 2019, the structure was simple. A team was in one country, so the company paid one carrier's roaming fee, or the local manager bought one pack of local SIMs and handed them out. This came with the added advantage of everyone enjoying the team-building exercise of trying to shuffle small plastic SIM cards on small plastic airline tables while trying to improvise a card-tray ejector spike out of an unbent paperclip.  

Travel with multiple deliverables and multiple stops, all and any of which might require the full use of the full corporate digital network and assets, all without the threat of punishing opaque roaming charges, is simply beyond the scope of the old model to deliver – and its breaking budgets and operations alike. 

Bill Shock  

For the average CFO, the new travel landscape can present a frustrating combination of rising costs and diminishing control.  

It’s certainly a positive indicator that travel spending is on such a steep rise, but it’s still doing so in a wider context of economic uncertainty and restless international trade relationships. The result is that travel budgets are under more pressure to perform than ever, and rising costs are now officially what stakeholders spend the bulk of their time trying to manage, being cited by 54% of travel managers as their top concern – an increase from 48% just a year prior.    

One of the unforeseen ways that hybrid work created more complexity in managing costs has been ‘after-the-fact’ expense reporting. In principle, this is simply the lag time between when an employee spends money and when the finance team actually sees and settles the transaction into a project’s bottom line. Because of the sheer complexity of where, how, on which platform, card, account and why an expense report is being filed, often weeks later, the money is already gone, and the ability to control the spend is lost.    

This same issue is true across almost every layer of having a team on a ‘stacked’ trip, as corporate travel data on a traditional postpaid roaming plan is a prime example of an after-the-fact liability.  

Thanks to the EU, data roaming tends to be a little more straightforward in Europe, but it’s still not without its pitfalls and the situation gets much worse when going transatlantic.   

A typical US-based carrier charges about $12 per day for a line on its ten-day business pass, which on face value is neither punishing nor unpredictable. However, it’s the fine print about what happens on day 11, or after exceeding the daily 5GB data cap, or moving beyond the pass region, that holds the real danger of bill shock.    

Research group ROCCO published a 2022 survey in which over 38% of all respondent enterprises said they’d paid in excess of $10,000 in roaming overage fees that year alone, all  because of this lack of control.    

Connectivity as Utility 

For decades, mobile data was the responsibility passed off between Finance and IT and entered as a fringe cost with the only performance metric being its absolute minimization. It was an expense that was only marginally tolerated, considered in the same category as taxi fares or the mini-bar, which employees might ideally be talked out of incurring at all.   

In 2026, this mindset won’t just be outdated but will be a strategic non-starter. Mobile data is no longer a perk but a business-critical utility, as fundamental to the digitally native enterprise as cloud computing or electricity.  

The disconnect starts with a misunderstanding of the modern mobile workload and is the same mindset that hopes reinstalling people behind desks will turn the clock back to when Corona was just a Mexican beer.   

The market estimate for just the tools and platforms used in the digital workplace surpassed €58 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach €140+ billion by 2030. The actual productivity that they create can reasonably be assumed to be a large chunk of global GDP and will continue to grow commensurately. 

A traveling professional's entire workflow now lives in the cloud and is accessed from their phone, tablet or device, and the data consumption of these tools is staggering for anyone old enough to remember paying connection fees per megabyte.  

A single hour-long Microsoft Teams call with three or more participants can consume the same volume of data as high-def Netflix streaming for the same amount of time. When a team is on a multi-stop trip, they’re certainly not on vacation or even really considered ‘out of the office’. They’re expected to be fully productive, participating in these data-heavy calls, downloading large presentations, and staying in constant contact.  

The strategic imperative for 2026 is clear, that keeping teams connected isn't an IT nice-to-have but a core business KPI. The goal is no longer to find the cheapest possible connection, but to secure guaranteed operational uptime at a predictable price. 

The Pivot to Prepay 

Enterprises looking to stay competitive in the short term, and stay in business in the medium, are looking at the way they provide their employees with data and increasingly find that the old postpaid roaming model is no longer working for them.  

This can be counter-intuitive to some, especially the same people who remember paying per megabyte, as ‘prepaid’ spent many years as a consumer-grade, inflexible option chosen by individuals who couldn’t afford a contract. The world changes and now, for modern enterprise, prepaid can be the optimal choice. 

The modern mobile data roaming enterprise prepaid plan is a sophisticated financial governance tool. Its primary and most transformative benefit is that it gives complete transparency and 100% predictability. Responsible departmentscan lock-in predictable costs and purchase connectivity in advance, often during the year-end planning cycle. The budget is set, the funds are allocated, and the risk of bill shock is not just managed but entirely eliminated. The budget line item is fixed, auditable, and controlled.   

This converts an unpredictable OPEX liability into a simple, predictable, and pre-approved purchase. American cloud management group Flexera has published a State of the Cloud Report since 2017, and last year’s was the first time ever that ‘cybersecurity’ didn’t top the list of challenges for cloud decision-makers. Instead, it was ‘data cost’, and by a landslide 82% of respondents. 

In a digital environment where more than eight out of ten cloud executives say their main challenge is managing what they’re spending on data, that’s a powerfully convincing indicator that every digitally active business needs to be looking to prepaid data models.  

For any company whose teams travel frequently across multiple regions but rely on high data availability or real-time connectivity, a prepaid global mobile data plan has emerged as the superior strategic choice. It offers one contract rather than many, one predictable cost, and it eliminates the operational chaos of the in-flight SIM-swapping circus. 

To be fair to many organizations that haven’t yet made this transition, it wasn’t always a viable option. Prepaid has not always had the requisite flexibility and scalability to meet enterprise needs, and it wasn’t until the advent of eSIM technology that this became possible.  

Agile. Secure. Scalable.  

The tech that has given prepay models the advantage, and powered a whole new generation of connectivity, is the eSIM. An eSIM business travel data plan isn't just an incremental improvement, but a digital transformation that fundamentally changes the relationship between an enterprise, its devices, and its data providers. 

The many revolutionary changes brought by embedded SIM tech are covered indetail elsewhere by 1GLOBAL, but for the moment it’s enough to just focus on how it changed the token of network access from a physical object to a digital profile. This solved the greatest logistical, operational, and security challenges of enterprise mobility.    

First, it delivered unmatched business agility and hugely simplified operations. The old model was a logistical bottleneck, where IT depts had to procure, inventory, and physically distribute plastic SIM cards to employees around the world. This process was slow, expensive, and rigid. eSIM virtualizes this entire workflow, enabling ‘zero touch’ remote onboarding of employees and their ongoing connection.  

An IT administrator, from a single dashboard, can ‘push’ a connectivity plan to a new hire's laptop or a traveling employee's phone in minutes, not days. For the traveler, this manifests as instant and effortless activation. They can land in any country, and their device is online before the ‘fasten seatbelt’ lights turn off. They don't need to hunt for Wi-Fi or juggle cards.    

Second, eSIM management platforms provide the centralized governance and control that gives IT departments a real-time command for all mobile plans for employees. They can centrally monitor usage, allocate data to teams or individuals, set spending caps, and see data consumption as it happens. This finally provides the real-time visibility and granularity that CFOs need to eliminate blind spots.    

Third, eSIM technology significantly enhances enterprise security. The alarming level at which corporations still rely on their personnel using insecure, open public Wi-Fi in airports, hotels, and cafes is one of the largest security vulnerabilities in modern enterprise. It's an open door for man-in-the-middle attacks and data theft. By providing instant, affordable, and secure cellular data, an eSIM plan moves employees off these high-risk networks, protecting sensitive corporate data.    

Moreover, eSIMs eliminate a specific physical threat ofSIM swapping scams. This hugely prevalent form of fraud is where a criminal either steals a physical SIM card or simply harvests enough personal data to trick a carrier into porting a number, thereby gain access to an employee's text messages and, by extension, their multi-factor authentication codes for bank accounts and corporate systems. The enterprise cost of this specific form of fraud is counted in the billions every year. However, because an eSIM is embedded, it cannot be physically stolen from a device, and thus neutralizes the entire risk vector.    

eSIM tech turns connectivity into a fluid, software-defined service that can be provisioned, managed, and secured from anywhere in the world. It is the technology that finally made the perfect enterprise prepay solution possible.    

SmartEnterprise In Action

The digital ecosystem of 2026 demands a solution that is as agile, global, and financially disciplined as the enterprises it serves. This solution must provide the absolute cost predictability of prepaid, the operational agility and security of eSIM, and the efficiency of a centrally managed global plan.  

This is precisely what the SmartEnterprise plan and 1GLOBAL management platform delivers. It’s the definitive prepaid corporate mobile data plan for traveling teams, designed to solve a number of the pain points identified above and providing an ideal global business roaming solution by mapping directly on to the new, complex challenges of corporate travel. 

For the CFO having to keep constant vigil for new avenues of bill shock, SmartEnterprise is a complete prepay solution. This simply means there are never any hidden costs, no extra charges. The plan allows an organization to predictably manage a budget with a single, integrated plan for the entire workforce. This is the ultimate tool for travel mobile cost control for companies, providing both transparency and control. The budget is fixed, and the risk of overage is zero.    

For the Ops Manager struggling with stacked itineraries, SmartEnterprise offers a single unified plan with coverage in 160+ countries. This eliminates the local SIM chaos, and an employee can travel from London to Paris to Berlin all on one plan, one contract, and one bill with 5G connectivity.    

For the IT Officer demanding agility and governance, SmartEnterprise is fully operated by 1GLOBAL’s own management and RSP portal. This enables instant deployment and one-touch remote onboarding. Using 1GLOBAL's ‘Zero Touch’ provisioning, an IT admin can push a plan to a device automatically without the employee needing to do anything but turn their phone on. This is all managed through a single intuitive connectivity dashboard providing end-to-end control and a perfect overview of employee usage.  

No More Breakage  

One of the most critical innovations available to SmartEnterprise clients is its shared data pool feature, and the elimination of breakage.  

Simply put, breakage is the value of unused data that in most contracts simply expires and disappears. When an organization assigns 10GB to an employee who only uses 1GB, the other 9GB is wasted but is still paid for.  

1GLOBAL's SmartEnterprise platform is the antidote to breakage. Instead of assigning hundreds of small, static, and wasteful individual plans, the entire team or whole organization draws from one single, collective pool of data. Data is no longer stranded and wasted but flows dynamically to where it’s actually need. This ensures that the organization gets the maximum utility from every single gigabyte it purchases, transforming connectivity from a perishable good into a fluid, shared asset.    

SmartEnterprise from 1GLOBAL delivers the cost predictability of prepay combined with the data efficiency of shared pooling. It leverages the security and agility of eSIM to create a single, unified solution. Contact our team today to discuss how SmartEnterprise can help transform your organization’s worldwide connectivity strategy.