Geopolitics is destabilizing corporate travel. Buyers will need to respond.
In 2025, air tickets booked worldwide by the Copenhagen-based travel purchasing consortium TravelpoolEurope on behalf of its 35 corporate members rose 9 percent year over year. But bookings to the U.S. fell 20 percent.
Across the Atlantic, Canadian applications for the Nexus trusted traveler program for entry to the U.S. in 2025 halved from 696,000 in 2024 to 344,000. “Business travel is not slowing down globally, but going into the United States there’s a very significant downtrend,” said Francis Harrison, the Toronto-based regional security director for North America for risk management company World Travel Protection.
For decades, business travel—which has been a reflection of nations that are partners in trade—has been supercharged by economic globalization. But such assumptions are weakening. Countries like Denmark and Canada no longer are sure they can consider the U.S. a partner. As Canadian prime minister Mark Carney told last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos, “great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”
Geopolitics and the Shifting Landscape of Corporate Travel
The challenges described by Carney create profound questions not only for trade but by extension where and how smoothly companies travel, the security of their travelers and perhaps even their choice of service providers.
On the most basic level of travel continuity, said Paul Mutter, a New York-based risk analyst for travel risk intelligence provider Riskline, “we’re seeing a deterioration of an environment that was pretty stable and is now subject to small but sudden shifts based almost entirely on U.S. policy changes that happen at the last minute.”
President Donald Trump’s newly discovered appetite for foreign military intervention—sometimes actual, sometimes threatened—is one example. But so too is his arsenal of sanctions against nations that incur his displeasure.
Mutter warned businesses to expect threats to impede the flow not only of trade but also of people through travel bans on entire nations. “We saw this last year in disputes with Colombia, South Sudan and several other countries,” he said. “The frequency is going to increase. It’s very difficult to plan for them, because if you do it all might get walked back. For Colombia, it took only a few weeks for that to happen.”
Read the full article on BTN.