At some point in the growth of almost every business, travel gets handed to someone. Not appointed. Handed. Along with everything else on their plate. And for a while, it works. Because in the early stages, travel is manageable. The team is small, the trips are infrequent, and whoever inherited the job knows everyone’s preferences and makes it work through goodwill and good judgement.
But goodwill doesn’t scale. And at some point, usually quietly, usually gradually, the system that was never really a system starts to show the strain.
The scaling pattern nobody talks about
Growing businesses professionalise in a recognisable sequence. First the sales process. Then the finance function. A CRM, a proper reporting structure, someone who owns the numbers. Then HR, then the tech stack, then the operational infrastructure that holds everything together as the team gets bigger and the complexity increases.
It’s logical. You fix what’s most visibly broken, in the order it becomes most visibly broken. Travel rarely makes that list. Not because it’s unimportant. But because it never quite catches fire in an obvious way. It just quietly gets more expensive, more time consuming, and more chaotic while everyone is looking somewhere else.
The process that worked fine at ten people starts creaking at thirty. By fifty, it’s broken. Someone is still reconciling expenses on a spreadsheet at eleven o’clock at night. Someone else just spent forty minutes getting approval for a flight that should have taken four. And somewhere in the business, a founder or senior leader is booking their own travel, time that costs far more than the ticket.
The governance vacuum
Here’s the harder question underneath all of that. It’s not just that travel is inefficient in scaling businesses. It’s that it’s ungoverned. And those are different problems with different consequences.
Inefficiency costs time. Ungoverned spend at scale costs control.
So ask yourself honestly:
Who in your business owns the return on your travel spend? Not who books the flights, who is accountable for whether that spend is delivering value?
Who is reviewing your travel policy? Not the version that was written three years ago and hasn’t been opened since, the one that actually reflects how your business travels today?
Who is negotiating with your suppliers? Hotels, airlines, ground transport, those relationships have commercial value. Who is managing them on your behalf?
Who is looking at your approval process end to end? Who decided it should take seven or eight steps to get a trip signed off, and when did anyone last ask whether that was still the right answer?
Who has visibility across all of it?
In most scaling businesses, the honest answer to every one of those questions is a version of nobody. Or everybody, which in practice is exactly the same thing.
What good looks like
It doesn’t have to be complicated. But it does have to be intentional.
When travel is properly managed in a scaling business, a few things happen that compound over time. Approval processes that ran to seven or eight steps come down to two, without losing the controls that matter. People book what they need, within policy, without the friction that leads to workarounds and off system spend.
Supplier relationships are actively managed, which means better rates, better terms, and someone who picks up the phone when something goes wrong at six in the morning.
Spend becomes visible. Not just in aggregate at the end of the quarter, but in real time, by team, by trip purpose, by outcome. That visibility changes the conversation from how much are we spending to what is it returning.
And perhaps most importantly, the people who should be focused on growing your business are focused on growing your business. Not managing a travel process that was never designed to scale.
At some point in your growth, you decided your finance function needed proper ownership. You decided your sales process needed structure. You decided your people function needed someone accountable for it. Those weren’t complicated decisions. They were the right ones at the right time.
Travel is the same decision. It just keeps getting deferred because it hasn’t quite broken badly enough yet, because someone is managing it well enough, because there’s always something more urgent.
But ungoverned travel spend doesn’t stay still. It grows with your headcount, your ambition, and your client base. And the longer it runs without proper ownership, the more it costs, in money, in time, and in the commercial focus of the people you’re relying on to drive your business forward.
That’s the problem Identity Travel was built to solve. Not just booking trips, but bringing the governance, the process, and the commercial rigour that scaling businesses apply to every other function and finally applying it to this one.
