Business trips are getting longer according to data shared by Corporate Traveller. In its report: The smarter business travel guide for finance leaders, in 2024 the average business trip length was 3.21 days. In 2025, it jumped to 5.31 days – a 65% increase year-on-year.
“Companies are batching their meetings,” said Juliette Da Silva, CFO of Flight Centre Travel Group South Africa. “Travellers are visiting multiple stakeholders and combining market visits that would previously have been split into three separate trips. If you’re going to incur the cost and the traveller disruption of getting on a plane, you want to maximise the return on that journey.”
Herman Heunes, GM of Corporate Travellers South Africa says this is called “trip stacking”. “The trips we’re booking in 2026 look nothing like the trips we were booking in 2023. Clients are coming to us with bigger, more complex itineraries – multi-city, multi-stakeholder, often spanning a week or more. What used to be three separate Johannesburg-to-Cape Town hops for three different meetings has become one trip that does all three plus a client dinner and a team workshop on the way through.”
He adds: “Five years ago, a lot of our cost conversations were around securing the best airfare. Now they’re about trip design: how you sequence meetings, where you base yourself, which hotel is actually closest to your three client sites rather than the one with the cheapest headline rate. Those decisions often save more money than a fare negotiation ever would.”
This is shifting where budget pressure shows up. “Longer trips mean more hotel nights,” says Da Silva. “And South African hotel rates have been climbing steadily over the last three years – from an average room night of R1 050 in 2023 to R1 301 in 2025. So, while companies are getting better value per trip, they also need to be watching accommodation spend much more closely than they used to.” Similarly, average international rates have climbed from R2 424 in 2023 to R2 877 in 2025.
This means that corporate travel policies need to catch up with traveller behaviour. “The longer-trip, higher-ROI pattern should be baked into policy, not treated as an exception,” Heunes says. If batching meetings is the new normal, corporate’s policies. should actively encourage it, he adds. “That means flexibility on minimum stay duration, smart advance-purchase requirements, and preferred supplier relationships that reward the kind of multi-night bookings your travellers are now making.”
