When a company looks at its travel spend, the conversation is usually about how much. The survey data on why people travel points at a more useful question: who are they going there to see?
When Morning Brew and Engine asked 439 business travelers and travel administrators which kinds of trips they take, respondents put industry events at the top, ahead of client visits and ahead of getting their own team together.
Conferences lead, client visits follow closely
Three kinds of trips account for most of what people described:
- 64% take trips for industry conferences, events, and trade shows.
- 52% travel for client or customer meetings.
- 44% travel for internal onsites with their own team.
Those figures add to more than 100% because companies do several of these. One quarter can hold a trade show, a couple of client visits, and a team offsite.
The ranking is the interesting part. The trip most likely to be on the calendar is the one where a company goes out to meet its whole industry at once. Deal-specific travel comes second.
Client visits sit just behind
At 52%, client or customer meetings are the second most common trip type, and they do a different job than a conference does. A conference puts a company in front of a whole market for a few days. A client visit puts it in front of one account that already exists.
The survey did not split client meetings by company size, so there is no size story to tell about that one. What the top of the ranking does show is that the two most common reasons to get on a plane both involve people who do not work at the company.
The order changes with company size
Split the same question by company size and the top two categories move in opposite directions.
- At companies with fewer than 500 employees, 70% take conference and event trips. At large and enterprise companies, 55% do.
- Internal onsites run the other way: 36% at small and midsize companies, against 57% at enterprises.
Small companies point their travel budget outward. Large ones spend more of theirs moving their own people around.
That fits how the two are built. A 60-person company has no offices in four cities to rotate through, and a conference is the few days when its buyers and its competitors are all in the same building.
How often this comes up
Travel is a regular rhythm for about half the people surveyed. 51% travel monthly or more, and at small and midsize companies that figure is 48%.
For most of these companies, that means someone is handling event travel every few weeks, all year.
What that means for booking
Client visits are usually one or two people and a single room for a night or two, which ordinary booking handles fine. Conference travel is where that breaks down.
Conference travel has a specific shape. Everyone needs to be in one city on the same dates, near one venue, and the good rooms nearby go early. Dates are set by someone else a year ahead, so there is no flexing the trip to a cheaper week.
That makes it a group booking problem more than a travel booking problem. When six people from the same company need rooms near the same venue for the same three nights, booking one at a time means six separate reservations, six cancellation policies, and no guarantee everyone ends up in the same hotel.
Engine's hotels for conferences and events setup is built for that case, and a hotel room block is the mechanism for holding a set of rooms before they sell. Engine's Groups team facilitated more than 100,000 group bookings in the last 12 months, and submitting a request is free, with no obligation to book.
Internal offsites and retreats, which rank higher at enterprises, create the same booking problem with a different guest list.
One caveat on "most common"
The survey asked which kinds of trips people take, not which ones pay off. Frequency and value are different measurements, and this data only covers the first.
A company could attend ten conferences and still get more out of one well-timed client visit, and nothing here would reveal it. Read 64% as the shape of the calendar, not a ranking of what matters.
How we know this
In June 2026, Engine partnered with Morning Brew to survey 439 business travelers and travel administrators in the Morning Brew audience. 59% of respondents work at small and midsize businesses (fewer than 500 employees); 77% travel for business themselves, and roughly one in four handle expense reporting, approvals, or travel policy for others.
Findings based on a proprietary market survey conducted by Morning Brew & Engine, June 2026 (N=439). Morning Brew published the broader findings, and our analysis of how small companies handle business travel covers more of what stood out.
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References
- Findings based on a proprietary market survey conducted by Morning Brew & Engine, June 2026 (N=439). Morning Brew article
