One set of answers in a new Morning Brew and Engine survey had nothing to do with what a trip costs. It was about hours: the time that disappears into booking the trip, chasing the approval, filing the expenses, and closing the loop afterward.
Morning Brew's coverage has the broader findings, and our first look at the survey rounds up the headline numbers. This piece follows the time cost on its own.
Travel admin runs about 94 hours a year
Travel admin is all the work that surrounds a trip: finding and booking the hotel, coordinating who goes where, getting sign-off, submitting or approving expenses, and closing out reimbursements.
- Respondents spend an average of 7.8 hours a month on travel-related admin.
- That comes to about 94 hours a year, or roughly 12 working days.
- The average American worker gets 11 paid vacation days a year.
No manager would sign off on 12 extra days out of the office. The same amount of time goes into travel paperwork every year without anyone approving it, because it arrives in 90-minute pieces spread across 12 months.
Small companies spend more of it, not less
- Respondents at small and midsize businesses average 9 hours a month, which works out to about 14 working days a year.
The intuition runs the other way. A 40-person company has fewer trips to manage than a 4,000-person company, so it should spend less time managing them.
Per person it does not work out that way. A single trip needs the same steps regardless of who books it, and at a smaller company there are fewer people to spread those steps across. The office manager who books the hotel is also the person approving the expense report.
The paperwork comes around more often than the trips
- Travel admin happens about 1.5 times as often as travel itself, and about 1.6 times as often at small and midsize businesses.
A trip is one event on a calendar. It generates a booking, usually a change to that booking, an approval, an expense report, and a reimbursement, each landing on a different day and often on a different person's desk.
Companies staff for the number of trips and then absorb the number of transactions.
Expense processing is the part both sides feel
- About 3 in 4 admins say processing travel expenses takes moderate-to-significant effort.
- 40% of travelers at small and midsize businesses say expense reports take too much of their time.
Travelers and admins are describing the same transaction from opposite ends. The traveler collects receipts and fills out a form; the admin checks the form against a policy and pushes it through to payment.
Neither half of that is hard work. It is repetitive work that arrives at an awkward time, usually after a trip when the person who took it has already moved on to something else. A standard expense report template removes some of the guesswork, though it does not remove the step.
A dedicated platform cuts the time by about 40%
Among small and midsize businesses, the survey separates companies that use a dedicated travel management platform from those that do not.
- SMBs with a platform report a median of 3 hours a month on travel admin.
- SMBs without one report a median of 5 hours.
- The gap is 40% less time for the companies that have one.
- Among admins with a platform, 22.4% name expense-report time as a top travel headache, compared with 33.3% of admins without one.
Two hours a month sounds small on a calendar and adds up over a year. The expense-report headache moves the same way, which is the pattern showing up again in a separate question.
One caveat on the hours
These are self-reported estimates, and nobody keeps a stopwatch on work that arrives in ten-minute pieces across a month. The hours are best read as an order of magnitude.
The platform comparison also looks at two groups of companies at a single moment. It describes what platform users report, and any one company switching would land wherever its own process takes it. Most small companies still do not use a platform, and we took that gap apart separately.
What takes steps out of the process
The survey measures how much time travel admin takes. It does not break that time down by step, so which part of the work is slowest is an open question in this data.
What it does show is a gap between companies running one system and companies running several. Consolidating booking and billing takes steps out of the process: when the hotel bills the company directly, there is no expense report for the room to write or approve, and the whole travel and expense process has fewer handoffs in it.
Engine puts booking, trip management, and billing in one place, free to use with no contracts and no minimums. If travel admin is eating roughly a working day a month on your team, see what the same month looks like without it.
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). Time figures are self-reported estimates.
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/travel-admin-time-statistics.
References
- Findings based on a proprietary market survey conducted by Morning Brew & Engine, June 2026 (N=439). Morning Brew article
