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 way B2B deals actually close now — all point the same direction. Here is the evidence.

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, in trips, and in strategic weight. Not because travel is romantic. Because six separate lines of evidence, from six different fields, now converge 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.

What is the money already saying?

Start with the least arguable evidence: the spend.

The Global Business Travel Association puts 2025 global business-travel spending at $1.57 trillion — an all-time high in nominal terms, reached in a year of tariffs, trade fights, and downgraded forecasts. GBTA projects 8.1% growth in 2026, to roughly $1.69 trillion, and a crossing of the $2 trillion line by 2029. Read that against the mood. Companies cut what they doubt. They are not cutting this.

The forward-looking numbers are stronger still. Sixty-eight percent of travel managers expect their budgets to grow in 2026. Among small and mid-sized businesses — the companies with the least room for waste — it's 80%. Conference and trade-show travel is projected to grow 7–9%, faster than the category overall. The companies closest to their own survival math are leaning into the road.

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 about 3.4% in 2026 — a drop of roughly 60% in seven years, according to benchmark data drawn from billions of sends. In B2B software, the floor is lower: 2–4%, with generic campaigns dipping under 1%.

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 Sales 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.

If the inbox numbers only mattered to sales teams, you could dismiss them as one channel's bad year. They don't. The clearest confirmation of the thesis comes from a different budget line entirely: B2B marketing.

Start with the sharpest stat in this paper. Event budgets are growing at +10.9% for 2025–26 while overall B2B marketing spend declines −3.1%. Read that twice. Marketing leaders are cutting the total pie and growing the in-person slice at the same time — the strongest possible signal of where they believe yield lives. In Bizzabo's 2026 benchmark research, 78% of organizers name in-person conferences their organization's most impactful marketing channel, and 54% of attendees plan to attend more in-person events than last year. Roughly 86% of B2B marketers plan to increase event spending in 2026.

Why is marketing money fleeing to rooms? For the same reason sales yield is: the digital channels it used to buy are decaying on both ends. Paid costs what we documented earlier — $125-and-up per software lead before the seniority premium. And organic is losing its floor too: roughly 40% of B2B prospects now research vendors through AI tools before they ever reach a search results page, which means the click a marketer used to win is increasingly answered before it happens. When the machine answers the question, the human meeting becomes the remaining place a vendor can be experienced rather than summarized.

The texture of the shift matters as much as the size. Forrester's Q1 2026 survey of 400+ event decision-makers finds nearly 70% of organizations running fewer events while protecting the experience of the ones they keep — one leader's phrasing: fewer events, but "if we're in, we're in." Sponsorship portfolios are concentrating into fewer, deeper partnerships. Success vocabulary has flipped from lead counts to ICP-fit meetings and event-sourced pipeline. That is not a channel in retreat. That is a channel professionalizing — applying to conferences exactly the yield discipline this publication applies to trips. Marketing and sales are converging on the same conclusion from opposite sides of the org chart: buy fewer impressions, fund more rooms.

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. 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. High-income spending is growing at rates approaching 20% while lower-income spending declines. Corporate profits jumped $166 billion in a single quarter of 2025 even as the labor share of GDP touched historic lows. 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 — up 29% in a single year — and involves about 88 touchpoints and ten stakeholders. Gartner finds 61% of buyers prefer a rep-free experience for research. Read carelessly, that last stat argues against travel. Read carefully, it's the strongest argument for it.

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. They say nothing about your slice.

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. Here is what would make us retract this one. If cold-email reply rates recover above 6% for two consecutive benchmark cycles, the lemons dynamic is weaker than we think. If GBTA issues two straight downgrades that put travel growth below inflation, the money has stopped voting. If Edelman's next barometer shows trust flowing back toward institutions and away from proximity, the trust argument fails. And if event budgets start tracking below overall marketing spend, the marketing witness recants. We will check all four, in public, every cycle — that's what the Benchmark is for. Until one of them moves, the convergence stands.

So: why are we sure? Because the forecast doesn't rest on one trend that could reverse. It rests on a convergence. The money is already moving ($1.57 trillion, growing 8%). The digital alternative is structurally decaying (reply rates down 60%, and the mechanism — free fakery — only compounds). The marketing budget is casting the same vote from the other side of the house (+10.9% into events while everything else shrinks). 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, still closes the old way: in a room.

Any one of these could wobble. 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 Sales Travel Survey — four minutes, twelve questions, and you get the Benchmark before anyone else. Add your answer to the evidence.