By Shauna Burns
Your next conference. Your leadership away day. Your client training day. Your annual townhall. Your strategy session in a city your team has to fly to. These are all events. Who’s managing the journey?
I ask because in my experience, the honest answer is usually: nobody is. Not really. Someone books the flights. Someone sorts the hotel. But the travel and the purpose it’s serving? Those two things are rarely designed together. And that gap, quiet, routine, and almost never named, is costing organisations more than they realise.
The moment that crystallised it for me
I’ve seen it more than once, but one situation stays with me. A significant budget. Months of planning. Real time, thought, and energy invested in creating a high stakes client event. Every detail considered. The venue, the agenda, the experience.
And then, almost as an afterthought, someone sorted the travel. Key people nearly didn’t arrive on time. Not because the event was poorly conceived. Because travel was treated as a footnote rather than part of the event itself. The experience that had been so carefully designed began falling apart before anyone walked through the door.
This isn’t just an events problem
Here’s where I think most organisations miss the point. When people hear “event,” they picture something formal. A conference with a stage and a thousand delegates. A product launch. A gala dinner.
But according to Deloitte’s 2025 Corporate Travel Study, conferences are now the single biggest driver of corporate travel, with nearly two thirds of business travellers expecting to attend one this year. Training and development has become the fastest growing accelerator, cited by one in five travel managers as their company’s top driver of travel growth.
In other words, the dominant form of corporate travel right now is people travelling together with a shared purpose. A conference. A training programme. A leadership offsite. A strategy day. That’s an event. Most organisations just aren’t treating it like one.
The structural problem nobody has named
Here’s why it keeps happening. The person planning the conference is measured on the conference. The quality of the content, the delegate experience, the feedback scores. They’re not measured on whether people arrived smoothly, rested, and on time.
The person booking the travel is measured on cost. Getting the cheapest available option within policy. They’re not in the room when the event is being designed, and the event team isn’t in the room when travel decisions are being made. Nobody owns the join.
And when nobody owns the join, the join breaks. Quietly, routinely, and usually at the worst possible moment, when the stakes are highest and the budget already spent.
The commercial consequence is real. Research shows that inefficient travel coordination can increase costs by up to 30%. But the harder cost is the one that doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet: the delegate who arrives frazzled, the executive who misses the opening session, the client who experiences the chaos before they experience the event.
What changes when you see them as one discipline
When Identity Travel became part of Identity Group, a global experiential organisation, I found myself building a commercial function that had to serve both travel and events simultaneously. That forced a perspective I didn’t expect.
When you’re inside an organisation that designs and delivers experiences for a living, you see very quickly that the experience doesn’t begin at the venue. It begins the moment someone books. The friction of a last minute flight search, the uncertainty of an unmanaged connection, the delegate navigating three different booking systems for one trip, that’s not a travel problem. That’s an experience problem.
And it’s entirely avoidable, when travel is part of the design from the start rather than a task assigned at the end.
The question worth asking this week
I’m not suggesting every organisation needs to restructure around this. But I think one question is worth sitting with.
Look at your diary for the next quarter. The conference your team is attending. The leadership day you’re pulling together. The training programme, the client summit, the away day. Now ask: who owns the journey for each of those? Not who booked the flights, who designed the travel experience as part of the overall one?
If the answer is unclear, or if it’s nobody, that gap is worth a conversation.
Because the events that matter most, the ones with the most at stake commercially, culturally, and reputationally, are precisely the ones where travel done as an afterthought does the most damage.
The experience you’ve invested in deserves to be treated as a whole. From the moment your people leave, to the moment they arrive, to the moment they walk back through their own front door.
That’s the work Identity Travel was built to do.
