July 26, 2026

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Painterly illustration of airplane passengers viewed from above from different eras. In the back is an older man with a wide seat looking at a stack of papers and holding a cocktail. In the row in front of him, a woman types on a laptop and a man with wired headphones looks at a piece of paper. In the row in front of them, a man looks at his smartphone and a woman is using a tablet.

João Fazenda

Editor’s note

Good morning. Put on that spiffy blazer and charge your devices, because the Brew’s taking you on a business trip. Today’s special edition will highlight the latest business travel trends, from “bleisure” becoming the standard to Orlando’s rise as the US’ top corporate meeting spot. We’ll also recommend some of pop culture’s best business travel moments and debate whether your boss should be able to ask you to share a hotel room with Bill from IT. Welcome to Business Travel Brew!

life of bleisure

Everyone is tacking fun onto their business trips

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They say never mix business with pleasure...but nothing is stopping you from combining business with leisure.

Known as “bleisure travel,” because everything needs a cutesy name, it’s the portmanteau to describe the act of tacking extra days onto the end of a work trip, bringing a friend along for a conference, or really anything that adds fun to stodgy business travel. Bleisure travel existed long before the pandemic—it was coined in 2009 by the business consulting group Future Laboratory—but it exploded in the aftermath, thanks to more jobs offering remote or hybrid positions that can be done anywhere:

Eighty-three percent of American business travelers at least occasionally turn a work trip into leisure, per a survey from the travel app Skyscanner.
The same survey showed that 42% of travelers add one or two days onto business trips, a sign that people are staying in a city after their business is concluded.
Nearly 40% of corporate buyers reported that business trips were growing in length, a sign that personal time is becoming a bigger part of work travel, according to a Global Business Travel Association survey.

Gen Z loves it: Nearly two-thirds of the youngest workers who travel for business are taking part in bleisure, according to a 2025 Harris Poll survey. Meanwhile, nine in 10 Zoomers see the trips as a chance to elevate their lifestyle (e.g., upgrading to first class or switching to a more luxurious hotel), per Hotels.com.

Top spots: According to Booking.com research, the best destinations for bleisure travel are New Orleans, followed by Las Vegas, Orlando, Boston, and Washington, DC.

Here to stay: Forbes reported that the bleisure market was worth $685 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $1.7 trillion by 2032.—DL

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AI’s getting all up in our business travel

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If you need proof that technology is changing corporate travel, AI has the receipts—literally. From reimbursements to booking trips, companies are turning to AI to streamline the process of heading out of town.

Expense rapport: Travel technology companies like Navan and Amadeus say AI can help remove friction from the expense process (you’re welcome, employees) and ensure policy compliance (you’re welcome, employers). It can also detect fraud by screening receipts to see if that sales client really ordered a $60 grilled cheese (when they got the lobster).

According to the AI finance platform AppZen:

Over a six-month period, more than 3.5 million phony AI-generated receipts were created on just a handful of websites.
From 2024 to 2025, the number of fraudulent receipts detected jumped about 30%.

Bundle up: The ultimate goal for many AI companies is to bring all facets of business travel under one umbrella. In May, software company Workday rolled out an AI travel agent designed to put trip planning, booking, approvals, and expense reporting all in one system. Travel software company Amadeus has a similar pitch for using AI to consolidate disconnected systems.

30,000-foot view: Even if companies don’t utilize a chatbot, AI is still having an impact, with travel companies like Booking.com increasingly incorporating the technology.—BC

flight of fancy

Flying private is now a standard top exec perk

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You’ll probably never hear a plane-with-only-two-parachutes joke featuring a crying baby, a chatty grandma, and the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. That’s because the besuited bunch is increasingly flying private—even as employers cut back on other lavish benefits for top executives.

The majority of Fortune 500 CEOs are now flying private on the company dime, according to the executive data firm Equilar. And data shows that company-provided private jet spending soared 19% between 2021 and 2024.

Sky-high spending

Corporate jet expenses at some blue-chip firms continued gaining altitude last year:

Palantir shelled out $17.2 million to whisk its CEO, Alex Karp, around the world for work and personal travel in 2025, far more than the $7.7 million it spent the year before. The steep bill drew investor scrutiny, as Karp owns the aircraft chartered to Palantir.
Mark Zuckerberg’s PJ travel cost Meta over $2.4 million last year, up from $968k in 2023.

Aside from acting as a talent retention tool, companies say funding sky Ubers for their top honchos is a personal security measure that’s become more necessary after the 2024 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Last year, Starbucks cited safety concerns when it scrapped its $250k annual limit for free personal private flights for CEO Brian Niccols, who commutes from his home in Southern California to the company’s Seattle HQ.

Big picture: The C-suite expensing their private flights is yet another tailwind for the $80 billion+ private jet industry, which has benefited from the growing ranks of hyper-wealthy individuals.—SK

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debate club

Should companies be allowed to make employees share hotel rooms?

After a full day of travel, sales pitches, and forced smiles, it’s nice to retire to the hotel room for a night of relaxation and TV reruns. But if you work for one of the businesses that require employees to split hotel rooms, you may have to share that moment with a coworker. Should that even be allowed?

The case against: While it is not technically illegal to make your employees share a room for their next work trip, let me ask this: Is your HR team bored? Do they need more nightmare situations to wade through on a daily basis? Most human resources and legal experts strongly advise against required roommates. It obliterates any downtime for employees to recharge and destroys personal boundaries between colleagues. You shouldn’t have to know what your coworker’s pajamas look like. Plus, the savings on lodging aren’t worth the possibility of having to navigate a harassment allegation.—MM

The case for allowing it: Splitting a room saves money (unless things go really wrong and the resulting lawsuit bankrupts your company) and it saves time, since you and your coworker only have to set one phone alarm instead of two. And if you both get upset by housekeeping showing up too early, that’s camaraderie. Sure, things may get awkward if your coworker borrows your toothbrush or loudly FaceTimes their dog every night, but thanks to your sacrifice, the next company pizza party may be able to afford extra toppings. So, ignore those smells and sounds from across the room, and focus on what truly matters: tomorrow’s presentation on Q3 loss ratios.—BC

place to be

Riding the Tower of Terror with your boss

Blurred people walking in DisneyWorld with Epcot Center in the distance

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Dropping 130 feet in the air must hit even harder if you just spent days trapped in conversations about synergy and ROI. This exact scenario is probably happening more than you’d think, because Orlando has ranked as the top meeting destination in North America for 11 straight years, according to the hospitality tech group Cvent.

Business travelers represented 10% of Orlando tourism last year, per Visit Orlando:

Nearly 6 million people visited the city for meetings or conventions, a 3.1% increase from 2024.
That outpaced the city’s overall 1.8% growth in tourism.

Why is Orlando a conference hot spot? It has more hotel room inventory than every US city except Las Vegas, but, most importantly, Disney World and Universal are major incentives for business people who may want to bleisure-ify their work trip. That’s also one reason why cities like New York, Chicago, and Las Vegas draw so many convention-goers—location can impact attendance as much as a convention’s content.

Speaking of Vegas…Sin City is actually the No. 1 convention destination, according to a ranking by US News and World Report, which considered the recent $600 million renovation of the city’s main convention center, its top-ranked hotel capacity, and its plethora of extracurricular activities.—ML

news you can use

A business travel pop culture primer

Bunking with your coworkers at a Hyatt Regency where the closest restaurant is a Ruth’s Chris you have to walk across the highway to get to may not sound like your ideal trip. But that’s what makes it such great fodder for Hollywood. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of quintessential business travel moments in TV and film:

The Office (“The Convention”): Though there are several business trips in the show (including an entire episode literally called “Business Trip”), its most indelible is the one in which Michael, Dwight, and Jim go to a paper convention in Philadelphia and Michael desperately tries to throw a party in his hotel room.

Succession (“Hunting”): Another series with a ton of business travel (this time on private jets), Succession became the stuff of legend when media magnate Logan Roy took his inner circle on a hunting trip to Hungary and made them play a sadistic game of “Boar on the Floor” to root out the source of a leak.

Industry (“It”): The financial thriller mostly keeps its brand of betrayal, self-sabotage, and extreme cocaine use contained to London, but in this episode, the Pierpoint gang goes to the COP climate conference in Switzerland...where they still do all that, except at a panel on climate investing in the Alps.

Honorable mentions:

The movie Up in the Air, starring George Clooney.
The episode of Mad Men when Don Draper flies to California for work and literally can’t stand the heat.
This scene in Mindhunter, in which director David Fincher distills the banalities of business travel into a great two-minute montage set to “Fly Like an Eagle.”
If you still want more, fans of Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Veep, Silicon Valley, and Hacks know there’s plenty of business travel hijinks throughout each series.—AE

brew's best

ICYMI, use your Sunday morning to get caught up on some of our most-clicked recent recs:

There’s a right time of day to shower. See whether the experts think you’re doing it wrong.
Here’s how to find a way to exercise, even when you don’t have the energy.
Get a drink and a sense of history at the oldest bar in every state.
The things in your house you should be washing more often.
This sleek travel mug is designed to preserve your drink’s taste, not just the temperature.**

The smartest $10 you’ll spend this year: the Smart Sticky Note. Stick a QR label on anything, scan with your phone, and add notes and photos, with no app needed. Stick one on everything you own—starting at $10.*

^{*A message from our sponsor. **This is a product recommendation from our writers. When you buy through this link, Morning Brew may earn a commission.}

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Written by Brendan Cosgrove, Dave Lozo, Matty Merritt, Sam Klebanov, Adam Epstein, Molly Liebergall, and Abigail Rubenstein

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