The road is about to get crowded

AI was supposed to kill the sales trip. Instead it is quietly writing the best business case the sales trip has ever had. Six forces: the money, the machines, the marketing budget, the trust data, the split economy, and the one witness that has since changed its story.

Every few years, someone announces the death of the business trip. Video killed it. Then the pandemic killed it. Then AI killed it, why fly when a model can run the meeting?

The corpse keeps booking flights.

This paper makes a specific claim: the next five years will see sales travel rise, not fall, in dollars and in strategic weight. Not because travel is romantic. Because six separate lines of evidence, from six different fields, converged on the same conclusion. When the trust researchers, the economists, the email-benchmark firms, and the travel forecasters all describe the same shape from different angles, it stops being a hunch. It becomes a forecast.

Re-verified 31 August 2026. We re-checked all six witnesses against their newest primary data. Five still testify. One has changed its story, and one number in the original, the year the money crosses $2 trillion, has moved against us. Both are corrected in place and scored openly in what would change our call, because a forecast that only updates when the news is good is not a forecast.

What is the money already saying?

Start with the least arguable evidence: the spend.

The Global Business Travel Association's 18th Business Travel Index, released at its Chicago convention on 3 August 2026, closes the books on 2025 at $1.59 trillion, up 8.4%: an all-time high in nominal terms, reached in a year of tariffs, trade fights and downgraded forecasts. It forecasts $1.71 trillion for 2026, up 7.2%, across 72 countries and 44 industries. Read that against the mood. Companies cut what they doubt. They are not cutting this.

Two things in this year's forecast are worse for our case than last year's, and we are going to say both out loud before we bank the good news. First, GBTA moved the $2 trillion crossing from 2029 to 2030, a full year later than the forecast this paper was originally built on, because growth moderates after 2026. Second, and more interesting: spend rises 7.2% while the number of trips rises just 1.3%, to 1.84 billion. Airfares and hotel rates are doing most of the work. The money is growing roughly five times faster than the travelling.

A lazy reading calls that inflation and moves on. The honest reading is sharper, and it happens to be the thesis of this publication: companies are buying fewer trips and paying more for each one. GBTA's chief executive, Suzanne Neufang, described companies as "increasingly more selective and productivity-focused." That is not a category in decline. That is a category being underwritten. Every trip now carries more cost, more scrutiny and more expectation of return than the trip it replaced. A market that flies barely more and spends considerably more is a market where the individual trip matters more than it did last year, not less. If you have ever had a trip questioned that would have been waved through in 2023, this line in a forecast is why.

The people who actually hold the budgets say the same thing, with a caveat we are not going to bury. In GBTA’s outlook poll of 571 travel buyers, suppliers and travel-management professionals across 40 countries, 84% expect their organisation's 2026 business-travel spending to rise (44%) or hold at 2025 levels (40%), and those expecting a rise expect an average increase of 12%. The caveat: overall optimism sits at 59% and is down 12 points from the run-in to 2025, with affordability (70%) and visa and border friction (65%) named as the leading constraints.

So this is not a boom, and anyone selling you one is selling you something. It is a category being funded and doubted at the same time: money still flowing, patience thinner every quarter. That is precisely the condition under which the discipline of a single trip stops being a nicety and starts being the thing that decides whether your budget survives the next review.

And they are getting paid for it. The 2025 GBTA/ASTA ROI study, 24 years of data across 14 U.S. industries, found business travel returns $14.60 in net operating margin for every dollar spent, and that U.S. firms are underinvesting by about $24 billion against the profit-maximizing level, leaving an estimated $2.4 trillion in potential sales unclaimed. A follow-up benchmark of 3,200 firms found companies that manage travel strategically post up to 30% higher revenue than peers.

So the baseline, before any argument about AI or trust: the money is growing, the buyers of travel expect it to keep growing, and the measured return says they're still not buying enough. Everything that follows explains why that gap is about to close from the demand side.

What did AI actually do to selling?

Here is the number that should reorganize every pipeline meeting: the average cold-email reply rate has fallen from 8.5% in 2019, to 5% in 2025, to 3.43% in 2026, a drop of roughly 60% in seven years, on benchmark data drawn from billions of sends. Look at the shape of that decline, not just its size. The channel gave up as much ground in the last twelve months as in the five years before them. In B2B software the floor is lower still: 2–4%, with generic campaigns dipping under 1%.

Keep the spread inside that average, because it is the most useful number in this section. Top-quartile campaigns still reply at 5.5%, and elite ones clear 10%, roughly triple the mean. Even in a channel that is visibly collapsing, discipline is worth a multiple of the average. Hold that thought. It returns at the end of this paper, because it turns out to be the same finding as the one about travel.

The decline steepened exactly when AI-generated outreach went mainstream. That is not a coincidence. It is economics.

A personalized email used to be a costly signal. It took a human twenty minutes, so receiving one meant someone chose you. AI made that signal free, and a signal anyone can fake is not a signal. Economists have a name for what happens next: the market for lemons. When buyers can't tell effort from automation, they rationally discount the entire channel and delete on pattern recognition. Buyers now receive more outreach in a week than they once did in a month, nearly all of it fluent, polite, and identical. They are not overwhelmed. They have adapted, by ignoring the genre.

AI didn't make selling easier. It made every cheap signal worthless, and left the expensive ones standing alone.

Now ask: what signals can't be generated? A body on a plane. A handshake at the buyer's office. Ninety minutes of undivided attention that visibly cost something to give. The sales trip is the one outreach channel with no AI substitute, because its entire value is the cost. In an inbox where everything might be a machine, showing up is proof of humanity, and proof of seriousness. Call it the proof-of-person premium: as the marginal cost of digital contact falls to zero, the market value of physical presence rises to meet it.

The follow-up data has always hinted at this asymmetry. In-person meetings convert prospects to customers at roughly 40% versus 16% for teams selling without travel, per the Oxford Economics research that still anchors the category. Our own 2026 Business Travel Survey found 74% of revenue leaders call in-person presence decisive in late-stage deals. What's new is the denominator: the digital alternative keeps getting worse. The 40% didn't have to improve for the gap to widen. The 16% is doing that work on its own.

Who else is reading this data? Marketing got there first, then changed part of its story.

If the inbox numbers only mattered to sales teams, you could dismiss them as one channel's bad year. They don't. The corroboration comes from a different budget line entirely: B2B marketing. But this is also the one witness in this paper whose testimony has changed since we first published, so we are going to correct ourselves before we use it.

The correction. This section originally led with a striking pairing: event budgets growing +10.9% while overall B2B marketing spend fell −3.1%. We have retired that pairing. It rested on a secondary aggregation we should not have leaned on, and the primary data now runs the other way. Forrester's budget-planning research has 83% of B2B marketing decision-makers expecting increased marketing investment over the coming year: the total pie is growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile Forrester's Q1 2026 State of B2B Events survey of more than 400 event decision-makers finds two-thirds of organisations still on flat or declining event budgets. Events are not outgrowing marketing. On the budget line, they are lagging it.

By the falsification test we published in this very article, that is a witness recanting. We are marking it as one rather than quietly deleting a sentence and hoping nobody kept the old version. It is the fourth item in what would change our call, and it is now scored as met.

What the events data does still support. Strip out the budget claim and something more useful survives, because the shape of event spending changed even where its size did not. The share of organisations seeing budget increases above 10% doubled year over year. A majority are shifting toward small, sub-200-attendee formats and participatory workshops and roundtables over presentation-heavy stages; only 18% are planning large hosted events. Sponsorship portfolios are concentrating into fewer, deeper partnerships. And the vocabulary of success has flipped from lead counts to ICP-fit meetings and event-sourced pipeline.

Why does in-person keep its pull even while its budget line stalls? For the same reason sales yield does: the digital channels it competes with are decaying at both ends. Paid costs what we documented earlier, $125-and-up per software lead before the seniority premium. And organic has lost its floor. In a March–April 2026 survey of 622 U.S. B2B professionals, 66% now regularly use AI to research vendors and solutions; 41% begin with an AI tool and only then validate through search; 92% say AI shaped their vendor shortlist; and 97% have discovered a vendor through one that they had not previously heard of. Our earlier estimate of roughly 40% researching via AI pre-search is superseded, and it understated the shift badly.

Read that from a seller's chair rather than a marketer's. The click you used to win is now answered before it happens, by a system that will summarise you accurately and forget you immediately. When the machine answers the question, the meeting becomes the remaining place a vendor can be experienced rather than summarised, and the only place where being memorable is still possible.

Most telling of all: nearly 70% of organisations are running fewer events while explicitly protecting the experience of the ones they keep. One leader's phrasing, quoted by Forrester, is the whole doctrine in five words: fewer events, but "if we're in, we're in."

Now put that beside what GBTA just measured in travel: fewer trips, more spent on each. Two budget owners on opposite sides of the org chart, working from different data, arriving at the same operating answer: concentrate. That convergence is worth considerably more to this argument than the budget-growth statistic we lost, because it is a finding about behaviour rather than about accounting. It is also exactly the yield discipline this publication applies to trips. Organiser-side surveys agree on direction, though you should read them knowing who commissioned them: in Bizzabo's 2026 benchmark, 78% of organisers name in-person conferences their most impactful marketing channel.

Where did the trust go?

If the inbox data shows the mechanism, the trust data shows the depth of it.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, 34,000 respondents across 28 countries, describes a world retreating into what Edelman calls insularity. Seven in ten people are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, backgrounds, or information sources. Nearly seven in ten fear institutional leaders are deliberately misleading them. The rise of generative AI itself ranks among the top five events reshaping trust, alongside inflation and misinformation.

But the finding that matters for this paper is where trust went. It didn't vanish. It moved, toward proximity. Over five years of tracked events, national government leaders posted a net trust change of −16 and major news organizations −11, while neighbors, family, and friends gained +11, co-workers +11, and one's own CEO +9, now trusted by 66% of employees. The single starkest number in the 2026 barometer is adjacent: My Employer, at 78%, is the most trusted institution it measures, 14 points clear of business at large and 25 points clear of government. Edelman's summary: trust has shifted from "we" to "me", concentrated among the people closest to us.

Translate that into commercial terms. Your prospect trusts institutions less, media less, and inbound messages least of all. Who's left? The people they have actually met. The vendor who sat in their conference room. The rep their colleague vouched for over dinner. Edelman even quantified the vouching effect: 62% of people who trust an influencer would reconsider a company they currently distrust if someone they trust vouched for it. Trust no longer broadcasts. It travels person to person, which means someone has to physically carry it.

Trust didn't disappear. It went home, to rooms, tables, and faces. Selling has to follow it there.

A sales trip, viewed through this lens, is not a transportation event. It is a trust-transfer event in the only remaining channel with rising capacity. The insular buyer is precisely the buyer who cannot be won by another email, and precisely the one who can be won by showing up, because showing up moves you from "institution" to "person I know." The Edelman data doesn't just permit more travel. It practically orders it.

Why does the K-shaped economy fund the flight?

The K-shaped economy began as pandemic shorthand. By 2026 it is the operating structure of the market: the top arm of the K compounding, the bottom arm treading water. The top 20% of U.S. households now hold nearly 72% of household wealth; as of the fourth quarter of 2025 the top 1% alone held 29.2% of it, against 5.3% for the entire bottom half. The top 10% of earners now account for close to half of all U.S. consumer spending. High-income spending is growing at rates approaching 20% while lower-income spending declines, and households under $75,000 now put a smaller share of their money into travel and experiences than they did in 2019 while households above $150,000 put in more. Corporate profits jumped $166 billion in a single quarter of 2025 even as the labor share of GDP touched historic lows. By May 2026 the New York Fed had stopped arguing about whether the split exists and published an explanation of what causes it. One economist put it plainly: "Economists are still debating this K-shaped concept, but CEOs are not."

What does a split economy mean for sales travel? Three things, all bullish.

First, the buyers worth visiting are concentrating. When spending power pools at the top, among the wealthiest households, the most profitable firms, the AI-capex winners, the revenue-weighted map of your market shrinks to fewer, richer accounts. Concentrated accounts reward depth over reach. Depth is what travel buys. You cannot email your way into an account that represents 10% of your year; you can absolutely fly into one.

Second, the sellers who are winning have the budgets. The K applies to vendors too. The firms on the upper arm, posting the profit growth, riding the AI investment cycle, are the same firms whose travel managers report expanding budgets. GBTA's data shows exactly this pattern: strategic travel spenders outperforming by up to 30%, and the outperformers reinvesting in the thing that works. The upper arm of the K travels; traveling helps keep it on the upper arm. That loop is a growth engine for the category.

Third, premium beats mass everywhere, including in selling. The consumer data shows luxury and premium thriving while mass-market struggles; the same bifurcation is hitting go-to-market. Mass outreach (the bottom arm: cheap, automated, saturated) is collapsing in yield. Premium selling, fewer accounts, senior audiences, in-person moments, is where returns are pooling. A sales trip is premium go-to-market. In a K-shaped market, that's the arm you want your motion on.

What happened to the deals themselves?

The final force is the quiet one: B2B buying got heavier. The average B2B purchase journey now runs roughly 272 days and involves about 88 touchpoints and ten stakeholders, and the buying committee keeps growing, averaging 11.2 people on deals above $50,000, up from 9.7 in 2024. Gartner's latest reading has 67% of buyers preferring a rep-free experience, up from the 61% this paper originally cited, and 70% saying they would rather buy through a completely digital, self-service process.

Read carelessly, that argues against travel. Read carefully, it is the strongest argument for it, and as of this year we no longer have to make that argument by inference. Gartner went and measured it.

In a survey of 645 B2B buyers released in May 2026, Gartner found that 69% of buyers turn to a sales rep to validate AI-generated insights. Forty-five percent had used generative AI during a recent purchase, drawing on an average of seven information sources, and then went looking for a human to check the machine's work. The head-to-head is the part worth pinning above a desk. Measured against generative AI, sales reps were 39 percentage points more likely to understand what the buyer actually needed, 32 points more likely to leave them feeling confident, 28 points more likely to move the purchase to its next step, and 21 points more likely to help quantify the benefit. Buyers rate the two sources as near-equally likely to mislead them: 51% for generative AI, 49% for reps. The machine is not distrusted more than the salesperson. It is simply worse at the part of the job that requires knowing who is in the room and what they are afraid of.

Gartner's own analyst drew the line so we don't have to. Sales leaders, said Robert Blaisdell, "should not interpret buyer preference for digital self-service as a signal that sellers matter less. It is a signal that sellers need to show up differently, engaging where they can help buyers validate information, reduce risk and move forward with greater confidence." Show up is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and it is the same work an airline ticket does.

Buyers self-serve the information. What they cannot self-serve is consensus. Ten stakeholders do not align by reading the same PDF; they align in a room, usually with the vendor in it. The longer and more crowded the journey gets, the more the deal depends on a small number of high-stakes synchronous moments, the executive alignment session, the onsite demo, the negotiation dinner. Everything else in the 272 days is prologue. And senior buyers behave accordingly: C-level executives respond to outreach at meaningfully higher rates than managers, and a majority of C-level and VP buyers say they prefer a call to another email. The people who sign are the people who still want a human.

This is why the follow-up disciplines matter more, not less, as journeys lengthen. A trip that produces a decisive meeting and then dissolves into a 42-hour average response time, the documented norm, wastes the scarcest asset in the whole system. The teams compounding travel's advantage are the ones who treat the trip as a conversion window: objectives written before booking, the debrief run on site, follow-ups out inside 48 hours. The rise of travel is not a license to wander. It is a rising price on wandering.

The catch: the rise will be K-shaped too

Here is the honest caveat, and it is the reason this publication exists.

"Travel will rise" does not mean "your travel will pay." The same forces splitting the economy will split the travel ledger. On one arm: teams that fly with written objectives, scored trips, protected recovery, and 48-hour conversion windows, capturing the 40%-conversion, 14.6x-return end of the distribution. On the other: teams that book flights as activity theater, chasing the feeling of momentum through airports, and landing the results the averages hide. The GBTA numbers say the pie grows, and this cycle they also say it grows faster than the number of slices, which means the average slice is now more expensive to justify. They still say nothing about yours.

The disciplines are not complicated. Before booking, a trip should survive a scorecard, and the ones that fail should die by memo, on paper, before they waste a quarter. The hotel should be chosen for the work, not the points. The follow-up window should be on the calendar before the flight is. None of this is expensive. All of it determines which arm of the K your travel budget lives on.

The pie is growing. The averages are lying. Discipline decides which arm of the K you're on.

Six forces, one direction

What would change our call

A forecast you can't falsify is a slogan. In July we published four conditions that would make us retract this one, and we promised to check them in public every cycle. This is the first check. It is not a clean sweep, and we would rather you heard that from us.

1. Cold-email reply rates recover above 6% for two consecutive benchmark cycles. Not met. The opposite happened. 2026 came in at 3.43%, down from 5% the year before. Stands.
2. GBTA issues two straight downgrades putting travel growth below inflation. One downgrade, not two: the $2 trillion crossing slipped from 2029 to 2030, and 2026 growth eased from 8.1% to 7.2%. At 7.2%, growth is still comfortably above inflation. Stands, on notice. A second consecutive downgrade in 2027 trips it, and we have written that date down.
3. Edelman shows trust flowing back toward institutions and away from proximity. Not met. The 2026 barometer runs harder the other way, with My Employer at 78% now the most trusted institution it measures. Stands.
4. Event budgets start tracking below overall marketing spend.Met. Forrester has overall B2B marketing investment growing for 83% of decision-makers while two-thirds of event budgets stay flat or fall. Retracted. The marketing-budget witness no longer supports a growth claim. What survives is its evidence on concentration, which we have re-stated above as concentration and not as growth.

One of four tripped. We said we would tell you, so we are telling you. The convergence is now five witnesses rather than six, and the sixth still testifies to shape while no longer testifying to size. Every cycle's check lands here and in the Benchmark; our corrections policy is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the same one we hold every company we score to.

So: why are we still sure, having just knocked out one of our own supports? Because the forecast never rested on a single trend that could reverse. That is the entire reason for building it out of six. The money is already moving ($1.71 trillion in 2026, growing 7.2%). The digital alternative is structurally decaying (reply rates 8.5% to 3.43%, and the mechanism, free fakery, only compounds). Marketing is concentrating into fewer, deeper rooms on precisely the logic travel is. Trust has relocated to the one channel travel serves (proximity, +11; institutions, −16). The economy is concentrating value into accounts that only depth can win. And the modern deal, ten stakeholders deep, now carries Gartner's fingerprints on the close: 69% of buyers walk what the machine told them over to a human before acting on it.

Any one of these could wobble. One just did, and the argument absorbed it. All six reversing at once is not a scenario. It's a wish.

The road is about to get crowded. The only question left is whether you'll arrive with a plan, and the data says most won't. That's your edge, if you want it. We're measuring exactly how this plays out across hundreds of revenue teams in the 2026 Business Travel Survey, four minutes, twelve questions, and your response contributes to the public Benchmark. Add your answer to the evidence.

Sales travel and business travel are set to rise through 2030 because the channels that replaced them are collapsing in value while the money to fund them is growing. Global business-travel spend hit $1.59 trillion in 2025 and is forecast at $1.71 trillion in 2026, up 7.2%, crossing $2 trillion by 2030 (GBTA, August 2026). But trips grow only 1.3%: companies are buying fewer journeys and paying more for each one. Meanwhile cold-email reply rates have fallen from 8.5% in 2019 to 3.43% in 2026, and 69% of B2B buyers now take an AI-generated answer to a human sales rep to validate it (Gartner, 2026). Presence is becoming the scarcest signal in selling, and companies are already paying for it.Rachel Julian, Editor-in-Chief · The Sales Traveler · 2026-08-31