Johannesburg – If you asked a CFO five years ago how their company would respond to South Africa’s post-Covid economic rollercoaster (rand volatility, inflation and constrained GDP growth), the answer would probably have involved a red pen and a travel budget. Fewer trips. Tighter policies. Grounded teams.
Instead, Corporate Traveller’s data points to something more interesting: a marked increase in trip duration. The insights form part of Corporate Traveller’s latest report: The smarter business travel guide for finance leaders.
As Juliette Da Silva, CFO of Flight Centre Travel Group South Africa explains, in 2024, the average business trip length was 3.21 days. In 2025 it jumped to 5.31 days – a 65% increase year-on-year.
“Companies are batching their meetings,” says Da Silva. “Travellers are visiting multiple stakeholders and combining market visits that would previously have been split into three separate trips. If you’re going to incur the cost and the traveller disruption of getting on a plane, you want to maximise the return on that journey.”
It’s also called trip stacking and Herman Heunes, General Manager of Corporate Traveller South Africa, sees the shift play out in booking patterns every day.
“The trips we’re booking in 2026 look nothing like the trips we were booking in 2023,” he says. “Clients are coming to us with bigger, more complex itineraries – multi-city, multi-stakeholder, often spanning a week or more. What used to be three separate Johannesburg-to-Cape Town hops for three different meetings has become one trip that does all three plus a client dinner and a team workshop on the way through.”
That shift has changed how Corporate Traveller’s client conversations unfold, Heunes adds.
“Five years ago, a lot of our cost conversations were around securing the best airfare. Now they’re about trip design: how you sequence meetings, where you base yourself, which hotel is actually closest to your three client sites rather than the one with the cheapest headline rate. Those decisions often save more money than a fare negotiation ever would.”
The behavioural shift is healthy for both ROI and traveller wellness, but it’s shifting where budget pressure shows up.
“Longer trips mean more hotel nights,” says Da Silva. “And South African hotel rates have been climbing steadily over the last three years – from an average room night of R1,050 in 2023 to R1,301 in 2025. So, while companies are getting better value per trip, they also need to be watching accommodation spend much more closely than they used to.”
Similarly, average international rates have climbed from R2,424 in 2023 to R2,877 in 2025. For a finance leader whose travel programme is still measured primarily on airfare savings, that’s a blind spot worth closing.
Both Da Silva and Heunes agree that travel policies need to catch up with traveller behaviour.
“The longer-trip, higher-ROI pattern should be baked into policy, not treated as an exception,” Heunes says. “If batching meetings is the new normal, your policy should actively encourage it. That means flexibility on minimum stay duration, smart advance-purchase requirements, and preferred supplier relationships that reward the kind of multi-night bookings your travellers are now making.”
Put simply, companies can save money in a number of ways: booking in advance (and as Da Silva notes, advance booking windows are already lengthening, up to 17.9 days in 2025), leveraging loyalty programmes, and exploring alternate accommodation options including guesthouses. Geographic clustering – combining multiple close destinations into a single trip – cuts airfare costs, while negotiating midweek rates lowers accommodation spend.
Da Silva frames it as a broader mindset shift.
“South African companies aren’t travelling less because business travel matters less,” Da Silva says. “The value of business travel is not in question. Instead, they’re travelling differently, stretching the return on every journey and tightening the discipline around when and how trips get booked. In today’s economic environment you have to make sure every rand counts. The companies doing this well are treating travel less as a line-item cost and more as a managed investment – and using current conditions as an opportunity to reset policies, renegotiate supplier agreements, and build programmes that flex with market volatility.”
For a closer look at the data – and a practical framework for managing travel spend in volatile conditions – download Corporate Traveller’s latest report here.
MEDIA CONTACT
For more information about Corporate Traveller, or to interview Corporate Traveller South Africa GM Herman Heunes, call Sonnette Fourie on 081 072 2869 or email sonnette@bigambitions.co.za.
About Corporate Traveller
Corporate Traveller is a division of the Flight Centre Travel Group, dedicated to saving businesses across Southern Africa time and money. Corporate Traveller has the benefit of being part of the world’s third-largest travel retailer, leveraging its global negotiating strength. It has access to over 50 of the world’s leading airlines and deals with more than 100 000 hotels around the world to guarantee savings for clients. Corporate Traveller provides clear, consolidated reporting of all its clients’ travel activities, helping them to control travel spend and identify opportunities to save costs.
Issued by:
Big Ambitions
Sonnette Fourie
+27 81 072 2869
