A new Morning Brew and Engine survey turned up a stark split in how companies book travel, and it tracks almost entirely with company size. Just 21% of small and midsize businesses use a dedicated travel management platform. At large and enterprise companies, it is 73%.
A gap that wide raises an obvious question: what are the other 79% doing instead, and what does it cost them? Morning Brew published the broader findings, and we pulled together a first look at the numbers that stood out. This piece takes one of them apart.
How small businesses actually book travel
When there is no platform, booking falls to whoever is traveling.
- 67% of SMB employees book their own travel however they choose, compared with 32% at large companies.
- 21% of SMBs book through consumer travel sites like Expedia, compared with 5% of large companies.
- 21% of SMBs use a dedicated travel management platform, compared with 73% of large companies.
Two of those numbers match: as many SMBs book company travel through consumer sites as through a dedicated platform, 21% each.
The "not big enough" answer
Among companies that do not use a travel management platform, 45% say the reason is that they are not big enough to need one.
Nearly half of the holdouts point to company size, and that answer sits awkwardly next to what the same survey found about their workload. SMB admins were more likely than their enterprise counterparts to flag employees overspending on travel, at 31.9% versus 18.8%.
What skipping a platform costs in hours
- Median monthly time on travel admin at SMBs without a platform: 5 hours. With one: 3 hours.
- SMBs with a dedicated platform report spending 40% less time on travel admin than those without.
Two hours a month does not sound like much. Over a year it comes to about 24 hours, or three working days of someone's time spent on booking and expense cleanup instead of the job they were hired for.
What looks different at SMBs that use a platform
Admins at companies with a dedicated platform reported fewer problems across most of what the survey asked about.
- Expense-report time as a top headache: 22.4% with a platform, 33.3% without.
- Employees not following travel policy: 2.8% with a platform, 12.4% without.
- Significant effort spent on last-minute changes: 7.2% with a platform, 14.1% without, roughly half.
The policy number is the one worth sitting with, because travel policy usually gets treated as a documentation problem. These results suggest compliance tracks at least as closely with whether booking happens inside a system at all.
A survey like this cannot separate cause from effect. Companies that adopt a platform may already run tighter travel operations, which would show up in the same numbers.
The four reasons SMBs hold back
Asked what keeps them from adopting a platform, admins named four objections.
- Unclear ROI: 66%
- Overall cost: 51%
- Getting locked into a long-term contract: 49%
- Losing flexibility: 39%
The same admins said what they want
- Flexibility to change or cancel: 46%
- A free-to-use platform with no contract: 43%
- Wide inventory: 38%
Those two lists mirror each other. Cost and contract lock-in are two of the four objections, and the second-most-wanted feature is travel management software sold without either one. Flexibility appears on both lists at once: it is what admins want most, at 46%, and the fourth thing they are afraid of losing, at 39%.
Engine is free to use, with no contracts and no minimum spend or volume requirements, which answers the cost and contract objections directly. More than 30,000 businesses have booked travel through it.
Unclear ROI is the objection worth answering on its own terms. It asks whether the time savings are real, and that is the part the survey measured directly: 40% less admin time at SMBs that use a platform, and a median of 3 hours a month against 5.
If you are in the 79%
Start with how often your team travels and who currently absorbs the booking. If that is one person doing it around their real job, the 5-hour median is probably conservative for you.
If you are comparing providers, we keep a ranked list of the best corporate travel agencies for small business. For project-based travel, crews, and job sites, travel management software for project teams covers that case specifically.
Or start on Engine for free and see what your own numbers look like.
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/small-business-travel-management-gap.
References
- Findings based on a proprietary market survey conducted by Morning Brew & Engine, June 2026 (N=439). Morning Brew article
