Among the findings in a new Morning Brew and Engine survey, one has nothing to do with booking tools or policy documents. It is about whose money pays for a trip while the trip is still happening.
More than 4 in 10 travelers at small and midsize businesses said they had covered work travel costs out of their own pocket. The full findings are on Morning Brew, and our first look at the survey covers what else stood out. This piece follows that one thread.
Paying up front has become routine
Someone has to put a card down when the hotel asks for one at check-in. At companies with no central way to pay, that someone is usually the person on the trip.
- 42% of travelers at small and midsize businesses have paid for work travel out of pocket.
- 48% of business travelers spend $1,000 or more of their own money on work travel in a year.
A thousand dollars is not a rounding error on a personal account. It is a few hotel nights, a flight, and a week of meals sitting on an employee's own balance until an expense report clears.
Some of that money never comes back
Fronting the cost assumes the money returns. For a meaningful share of travelers, some of it does not.
- 1 in 4 travelers at small and midsize businesses (26%) were not fully reimbursed for what they spent.
- 42% of travelers at small and midsize businesses go unreimbursed for more than $250 of their own money in a typical year, compared with 29% of travelers at large and enterprise companies. The SMB rate is 1.4x the enterprise rate.
- 37% of travelers at small and midsize businesses said they waited too long to be reimbursed.
$250 is the threshold the survey asked about, so the figure counts everyone above that line without capping how far above they went. What it describes is a year in which an employee subsidized their employer's travel and absorbed the difference.
Waiting is its own cost
Late reimbursement never shows up in a budget, but the traveler feels it. An employee who fronts $1,000 of their own money is extending their employer an interest-free loan for however long the reimbursement takes, on terms nobody negotiated with them.
That is the part travelers talk about. It is also the part that stays invisible to the people setting travel policy.
Most companies cannot see the number
When employees absorb travel costs on their own accounts, the company's books never record the spending at all. The survey asked admins at small and midsize businesses to estimate what their employees collectively pay out of pocket for travel each year.
- 24% estimated $50,000 or more a year.
- 23% estimated between $15,000 and $49,000.
- 21% said they had no idea.
About a fifth of the people responsible for travel at their own company could not put a figure on it. For the ones who could, the estimates land in a range that would get scrutiny if it appeared as a line item anywhere.
Why this keeps happening at small companies
Admins are not oblivious to it. Asked to name their biggest travel headaches, admins at small and midsize businesses selected employees paying out of pocket more often than any other option, at 40%.
What most of them lack is a mechanism. Without a way to pay a hotel directly, the traveler's own card becomes the payment method by default, and reimbursement becomes the cleanup step afterward.
The mechanism usually arrives with a travel platform, and most small companies do not have one. Just 21% of small and midsize businesses use a dedicated travel management platform, compared with 73% of large and enterprise companies. We took that gap apart separately.
Direct billing takes the employee out of the transaction
Direct billing means the hotel bills the company rather than the guest. The traveler checks in, stays, and checks out without paying for the room, and the room charge lands on the company's account instead of theirs.
Nothing about the room needs reimbursing afterward, because the traveler never paid for it. Speeding up an expense report and deleting one are different kinds of fix, and this is the second kind.
It does not cover a whole trip. Meals, ground transport, and incidentals still run through expense reports, so what direct billing changes is the size of what employees have to front, not whether they front anything at all.
Consolidated invoicing does the corresponding thing on the finance side. Instead of reconciling a stack of individual expense reports, the company gets one invoice covering every stay, which is also where the spending becomes visible enough to manage.
Engine is free to use, with no contracts and no minimums, and hotel stays booked through it can be billed to the company rather than to whoever took the trip. If your team is currently running on reimbursements, see what it looks like without them.
Frequently Asked Questions
About this research
These findings come from a proprietary market survey conducted by Morning Brew and Engine in June 2026, reaching 439 people in the Morning Brew audience who identified as business travelers, travel administrators, or both. Fifty-nine percent of respondents work at companies with fewer than 500 employees ("SMB" throughout this analysis).
Cite these findings: Findings based on a proprietary market survey conducted by Morning Brew & Engine, June 2026 (N=439). Read the full study on Morning Brew, or reference this analysis at engine.com/blog/out-of-pocket-business-travel-expenses.
References
- Findings based on a proprietary market survey conducted by Morning Brew & Engine, June 2026 (N=439). Morning Brew article
