The 5 Biggest Sources of Travel Program Leakage - And How to Stop Them
Travel program leakage happens when money, data, or control slips outside of the program in ways that are hard to track and even harder to recover. Individually, these issues may seem minor. Collectively, they can undermine savings initiatives, weaken policy compliance, and make it nearly impossible to prove ROI.
The five most common sources of travel program leakage:
1. Out-of-policy bookings and unmanaged spend
When travelers book outside approved channels, the impact goes far beyond a single expensive ticket. Off-channel bookings reduce negotiated rate usage, break duty of care processes, and fragment data across multiple sources.
Research commissioned by Navan and conducted by Euromonitor International found that nearly two-thirds of global business travel spend remains unmanaged. Even among organizations that work with a TMC, approximately 10 percent of bookings still occur outside approved booking channels. This highlights how out-of-policy behavior persists even in mature travel programs.
How to stop it
The solution is not just stricter rules. It is visibility and ease of use. Programs that integrate booking, payment, and reporting make it easier for travelers to do the right thing while giving travel managers insight into where leakage is occurring. Clear policies, combined with data that shows where and why travelers go out of policy, allow programs to adjust without alienating users.
2. Payment fragmentation and reconciliation gaps
Fragmented payment data makes it difficult to tie spend back to trips, travelers, or cost centers. This creates delays, increases the risk of duplicate payments, and limits the ability to analyze true program performance. Over time, these gaps quietly erode confidence in travel data across both Travel and Finance teams.
How to stop it
Reducing payment-related leakage starts with consolidation. Centralized, purpose-built travel payment solutions help ensure transactions are directly tied to bookings, travelers, and policy rules from the start.
For example, solutions like graspPAY are designed specifically for travel use cases, capturing payment data at the transaction level and aligning it automatically with booking and traveler information. This reduces manual reconciliation, improves accuracy, and gives finance teams a clearer view of spend while allowing travel teams to move faster and operate with confidence.
3. Poor data quality and inconsistent reporting
You cannot control what you cannot see. Many travel programs rely on reports built from incomplete, inconsistent, or poorly normalized data. Different suppliers use different formats, fields are missing, and manual clean-up becomes the norm.
This kind of data leakage does not always show up as a line item cost, but it erodes trust in reporting. When stakeholders question the data, travel teams struggle to justify decisions, defend budgets, or identify meaningful savings opportunities. Over time, this lack of confidence can be just as damaging as overspend itself.
How to stop it
The foundation of any effective travel program is clean, reliable data. Automated data normalization and enrichment ensure that information from multiple travel and payment sources rolls up into a consistent, travel-specific data model.
Solutions like graspDATA are built to address this challenge directly by standardizing, cleansing, and enriching travel data before it ever reaches reports or dashboards. When data is aligned at the source, teams can compare apples to apples, identify trends with confidence, and deliver insights that stand up to scrutiny from Finance, Procurement, and leadership.
4. Limited visibility into non-employee and guest travel
Non-employee travel is one of the fastest-growing sources of leakage. Candidates, contractors, speakers, and other guests often travel outside traditional booking and payment flows. As a result, spend is harder to track, policies are inconsistently applied, and data frequently sits outside the core travel program.
Without visibility, these trips quietly inflate costs and increase risk exposure, all while remaining largely invisible in standard reports. Many organizations accept this as unavoidable simply because their existing tools were not designed to support non-employee travel at scale
Learn how a large public university got a handle on non-employee travel ->
How to stop it
Extending travel and payment controls to non-employee travel brings this spend back into the program without adding friction. When guest travel is booked and paid through structured workflows, organizations can apply policy, maintain oversight, and capture consistent data across both employee and non-employee trips.
After moving to graspPAY, this organization was able to support non-employee travelers by booking them on central credit lines rather than relying on personal cards. Guest travel could be managed through existing travel agency workflows, virtual cards were issued with clear controls, and transactions were automatically tied back to travel records. This eliminated out-of-pocket expenses for travelers, simplified reconciliation, and brought non-employee travel fully into program reporting.
The result was leveraging existing booking processes for non employee travel, stronger controls, and significantly improved visibility into a category of spend that had previously been a blind spot.
5. Manual processes that do not scale
Manual processes are a hidden drain on travel programs. From spreadsheet tracking to one-off reconciliations and ad-hoc reporting requests, these workflows introduce delays and increase the risk of human error.
Over time, manual work becomes a form of leakage by consuming resources that could be spent on strategic initiatives. It also limits scalability, especially as programs grow or become more complex.
How to stop it
Automation is key. Travel programs that automate reporting, reconciliation, and data management reduce leakage by eliminating repetitive tasks and improving accuracy. This allows travel managers to focus on optimization rather than administration and ensures the program can scale without adding overhead.
Turning leakage into opportunity
By addressing unmanaged spend, fragmented payments, poor data quality, limited non-employee visibility, and manual processes, organizations can transform their travel programs from reactive to strategic.
At Grasp Technologies, we help travel teams and TMCs bring data, payment, and reporting together so leakage becomes visible and manageable. When you can see where value is slipping away, you can finally start to reclaim it.
