What to Expect at GBTA's 2026 Conference

In just two weeks, the GBTA | Global Business Travel Association 2026 Convention kicks off in Chicago, bringing together thousands of leaders shaping the future of business travel.

Ahead of the event, Jeff Borman and Matt Brown sat down with Katharine Farrell, Vice President, Americas at GBTA, to talk about what's happening in the industry. 

While AI is dominating the headlines, travel managers are navigating geopolitical uncertainty, evolving traveler expectations, tighter budgets, duty of care, and a rapidly changing technology landscape.

In this episode:

🛎️ The big themes at GBTA 2026.

🛎️ Why travel managers are more strategic than ever.

🛎️ How AI is actually being used inside corporate travel programs today.

🛎️ The unique challenges facing small and mid-market organizations.

🛎️ Whether the traditional RFP still has a place in an AI-first world.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Matt Brown 0:07

Hi everybody, it's No Show with Matt Brown and Jeff Foreman. Global travel, like the globe itself, has changed quite a bit over the last 10 years, as we've all witnessed. Pandemics, Zoom, AI, hybrid work, war zones, sustainability initiatives, recessions, and a fleet of forces, both challenging and freeing, have shaped and reshaped the way that people travel for work. Catherine Farrell is Vice President Americas for the Global Business Travel Association. It's the world's leading global travel and meetings trade association. She is ideally situated to do so, as she's had a relationship with the organization for years. She came out through the GBTA's Ladders Mentoring Program, where she later served as an alumni advisor after previously co-chairing the program's Media and Communications Committee. She's been honored twice as GBTA Foundation's Winnet Top 50, recognizing outstanding women professionals in business travel. She's also served as a GBTA board member. Before that, she stops at her own consultancy, Dots and Lines, and Delta Airlines. She is a demon deacon, mother of dragons, private pilot, survivor of Atlanta summers. Catherine, thank you so much for being on No Show.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

GBTA Convention Themes And AI

Jeff Borman 1:25

Catherine, GBTA, the big event right around the corner. What are the big themes?

SPEAKER_00 1:31

I think it's going to be a really exciting convention this year. We've got a lot planned. Um, I think anytime you're talking about education right now, which is certainly a large part of our program, um, you can't get away without talking about artificial intelligence. So that will be a track that we're going to be focused on as far as our ed sessions are concerned this year.

Matt Brown 1:54

There's a dedicated future ready leadership track this year. What does that mean for a travel manager right now? What what is what does the future look like, at least as far as the sessions go?

Future Ready Leadership In Disruption

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Being in the space, we all know that uh travel is certainly never boring. Um and there are uh different things that uh happen on a regular basis uh that make our the travel manager job uh interesting. And so, you know, what we're finding from our members is that you know, we've got about 70% of our buyer members who say that travel management becomes more critical during disruption. Um, so that means that the role is pulled in closer to leadership and risk management and enterprise decision making. And so, you know, we saw that certainly during COVID, and uh, we're continuing to see that with the recent uh geopolitical um uncertainty that we have and uh different economic factors right now,

Where Business Travel Stands Now

SPEAKER_00 2:53

too.

Jeff Borman 2:53

Bill Gates, uh at least in our circles, right, famously said business travel would never reach 50% of what it was pre-COVID. And uh I think we all know that was not accurate. We're all thankful that was not accurate. But where does it stand today in terms of, you know, number of flights, not the revenue, because pricing has changed a lot, but you know, number of flights, number of hotel room nights, right? Where does business travel stack up to prior pandemic figures?

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Certainly we have been seeing that the volume has been uh recovered from from COVID. But you know, in terms of optimism, that's something that we certainly track on a regular basis among amongst our membership. Um we have regular sentiment polls that we push out. And so for January of this year, uh we had industry optimism um at about 59%. That has fallen um to 41% in April of this year. Um so optimism is down a bit, but we are finding that even though the regional optimism has dropped a bit, we're continuing to see it's uh net positive in North America. Um, so we uh have our members reporting that uh to us in our regular surveys as well.

Small And Mid Market Travel Challenges

Matt Brown 4:14

You also are have a track that's small to mid-market enterprises. First of all, what kind of what is that? And just for folks who who may not know or have not been to the convention before, how how are they different? How small and mid-market, what are their challenges in comparison to to kind of these big enterprise conversations?

SPEAKER_00 4:34

I think travel managers generally have to wear a lot of different hats, um, whether that's in a big enterprise environment or if they are um an SME. Uh, but particularly for the small to mid-market enterprises, um, one of the challenges that often gets challenges that often gets overlooked is that these travel managers are expected to deliver many of the same things uh that their counterparts at much larger organizations are expected. So that's cost control, uh, traveler satisfaction, risk management, uh, supplier negotiations, and then technology modernization. Um, but that's with far fewer resources and less specialized staff and lower travel volumes. So they really have a tall order in terms of what they're expected to do. And so GBTA created this dedicated track that focuses for this specifically on this segment of our membership to provide them with practical and real world uh solutions that can help the programs do more with less.

Matt Brown 5:40

Do you have a session or a speaker who kind of shows up regularly at the show that you you always kind of make

Practical AI Use Cases And Security

Matt Brown 5:46

time for?

SPEAKER_00 5:47

Oh gosh. Well, I'm excited about the session that I'm actually leading this year.

Matt Brown 5:52

Of course.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

And it's not because it's not because I'm gonna be on stage, it's because of the two uh co-facilitators that I'll have with me.

Matt Brown 6:02

Of course, of course.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

It is an artificial intelligence focused session, um, but it's going to be a workshop style. So really allowing attendees to come in and leave with something tangible that they can implement right away in their programs. And uh, I think both of the co-facilitators that I have um who are gonna be joining me on stage have really great stories. They're gonna each be bringing a case, a very short uh case study on what they're doing with AI in their uh different roles.

Jeff Borman 6:30

And who is the application of AI different in this specific segment?

SPEAKER_00 6:35

One of the things that we're finding that's really interesting uh in terms of AI and in within the segment specifically is uh that two-thirds of our travel buyers are already using AI in some form. So uh about 41% are proactively uh implementing AI use cases, and then another 28% are using AI that's built into existing travel tools. And that can range in terms of what it's being used for. So we have uh things like reporting, pricing insight, and spend forecasting. I think one of the things that's uh unique about the corporate travel space is that there's a lot of data availability. So it's not so much a shortage of data, it's really making it actionable. Um and AI, we've been finding has been really helping with that. Um, and so now we're when we look at our program uh for this year and when we look at what people are interested in, it's really less about adopting AI and it's more about ensuring that it's safe and secure. Uh, because along with that wealth of data that we have as an industry, there's also a lot of, you know, uh challenges in terms of making sure it's secure, right? It's it's a lot of personal, um, personally identifiable information. Uh so it's it's the story to now is less about adoption and and more about just making sure it's being used to the most of its ability, and then also that it's safely and securely.

Duty Of Care Versus AI Freedom

Jeff Borman 8:08

You know, I wonder, uh just pontificating here, uh duty to care is something that in the GBTA world uh is a core principle, right? If you're if you're a company sending a uh one of your employees out on behalf of company work, uh you have to make sure it is the obligation of the company to make sure they're well taken care of and safe. And one of the things that I wonder about with the application of AI is uh how it can break down if it's allowed to be used for this purpose, uh, some of the very structural elements that have grown up in the industry to protect duty of care. Meaning, I I'm a business travel manager for a large company. I I therefore only approve my travelers to stay at these seven hotel uh brands, or only in this part of town. It's not just about price, but there are a lot of parameters that go with that to make sure that travelers are taken care of. In other segments, leisure especially, which is not structured very much, uh AI is tearing down uh traditional channels and behavior, and especially the thought of agentic, meaning that I could just say, Hey, I need a hotel and it's gonna go get it for me. Uh if I were a travel manager, uh, the potential for people to then go outside of the parameters has never been so great. Uh so I'm I'm wondering, I mean, is there a real concern of how to both leverage this technology uh but also maintain the control that travel managers need for the health and safety of their people?

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, what you bring up in terms of uh what we call is program leakage is is something that's certainly not new, you know, but people going and booking outside the established program. And, you know, there are a lot of reasons why uh that's uh not encouraged, but I I think that, you know, duty of care is certainly one of those factors that's really important in terms of our discussion on that. Um, I think that in terms of utilizing AI, it's it's an interesting point that you bring up because I feel like where it can be good is and used really well and efficiently is where there's just a lot of different factors and variables and things to consider and kind of making um sense of that and and streamlining it. If I think about how I use AI in my own daily uh daily work or personal life, it's you know a stream of consciousness that I then ask it to distill and say, you know, give me give me three solid bullet points on this paragraph that um that I've just given you. So I think that it could actually be really beneficial in a lot of ways. I come from a marketing and communications background. So I think that when we talk about traveler communications, um, that's a real area um that is exciting uh for me because you know that is uh a challenge with, you know, you have uh marketing teams, communications teams that are constrained. There's only so much time in the day and so many people to do the work. Um so usually some of the AI technology to uh improve um the frequency, accuracy, um communications for travelers, I think that that's something that's exciting too.

DIY Chatbots For Travel Managers

Matt Brown 11:34

This is a question for both of you. Um I know at the at the convention you have a lot of AI-powered uh travel tech companies. Everybody's got to put AI powered in their uh in their marketing materials. But I wonder how close we are. I mean, this is probably already happening, right? Where I handle travel for my company of 200 to 500 people. I'm just gonna start training Claude or Perplexity or Gemini or Chad or whatever to start building my own system here. I don't need technology the way that I thought I did to track things two or three years ago. Something somebody's selling me that. I'm now gonna use one of the LLMs to essentially build my own system. Now, of course, the LLMs will start charging you more and more for the privilege to do that. But I wonder how much that's being experimented with.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you know, it's interesting because this is an example that from the 2025 convention. Um, but I sat in an education session prior to joining GBTA uh as a staff member in January of this year. And one of the travel managers on stage talked about creating a um uh a chat bot that would answer common questions from travelers. So I think, and they just did that on their own. So I do think that there is some of that going on. I would be really excited to see where that's developed after we've, you know, had a full year uh to grow and have more things um happen in the space. Um, but I I think that that is something that I could see as a huge benefit and a huge positive to travel managers uh because they do have a lot on their plates. They do wear a lot of different hats. And if you can have the assistance of an LLM or a chatbot that you develop to get you out of the business of those common questions that can uh take up a lot of a travel manager's time, it really enables people to be more strategic, um, more proactive in their jobs. And so I think it could be a huge benefit.

Matt Brown 13:40

Not to mention the travelers themselves that are working for the company, they come back, uh you sit back down on your laptop, give me your receipts, give me any other kind of details you want, I'll take care of all this and send it to our travel manager. I think the ease of that for the travelers themselves is going to be very compelling.

RFPs Compliance And The Human Factor

Jeff Borman 13:57

I wonder about that, Matt, in the way of is the traditional RFP dead? The process is so cumbersome for everybody involved. If ultimately repetitive tasks are being able to get removed from the human life, you know, activity. The question to me then is you're at a fork in the road. Does that remove the humans from involvement? Because it is a purely objective linear set of decisions, right? Uh you're only going to do this price. You're only going to only accepting RFPs at this price with these parameters. I only want three in the program, right? Like everybody's got their own parameters, but everybody also wiggles around those parameters because they have certain properties that they've been with forever and they have relationships and then they're guests lump. You know, or or vice versa. Uh I think we've all seen examples where uh an account cannot, you know, a hotel cannot get back into an account because damn, they sure burned them one year. And it doesn't matter what you put on paper, you are never getting back into my program. My travelers went right like so the fork in the road that I'm curious about and watching is which does the human element become more important because we've removed all the unnecessary paperwork of RFPs? Uh or do we simply turn it off at some companies and say, eh, we don't we don't need business travel managers, we don't need a program. We just need to run a set of parameters and we're only going to approve expense reports that fit them.

Matt Brown 15:31

Right. Catherine, just out of curiosity, when you travel for the association, who handles all of your travel?

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Um, so we do have someone who's responsible for travel um and in the association, but that's not her only role. Uh so I think that we find ourselves a bit in the SME space um in terms of that. So uh, but we do have you know a managed program. I think we need to uh practice what we preach. Uh and so we we do uh manage our travel, all of us book through the proper channels and I would expect GBTA to be the most compliant to its program, right? Um no, I mean I I think we do a pretty good job of of being compliant uh as a staff for sure. We're we're definitely you know, as an association, um we're we're very conscious of making the most of our travel dollars and our spends. So we we try to do the best.

Matt Brown 16:31

Listen to that on-brand team spirit. I love it. I know I know there's a center somewhere in there. I know there's somebody who goes off and does their own thing, and we'll find them.

Jeff Borman 16:44

When I think back over the long period of time and how business travels uh evolved, uh I think hotels made a grave mistake about 25 years ago uh when uh they started to tightly correlate a travel manager's uh ability to drive compliance with the price of it. So uh it wasn't compliance was not uh on point uh decades ago, right? It was an idea. It was he these are in the program, but travelers kind of did what they wanted. And hotels, amazingly short-sighted, kind of went after the travel managers that way. Said, hey, I'm not giving you good deals anymore. If you can't push your traveler to me, I'm giving you deals, but they still stay all over town. And that really started to drive hard compliance, which then this is where hotels messed up, put all the power in the hands of uh the BT manager, because now that person had the ability to drive compliance and thus had the ability to say, You're in the program and you're not, and now I want a much better deal.

Best Trip Story And Closing

Jeff Borman 17:48

So the evolution of this thing has uh it's fun to watch over so many years. That said, was this evolution of no compliance to high compliance? Who has benefited from this?

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Um you know, I think there are a lot of really good reasons um to have high compliance, right? I I think that duty of care is one that you mentioned, right? Um, and and certainly really large enterprises and organizations, that's core to their travel program and and their their strategy. As we get more sophisticated from a technology standpoint, from a data standpoint, it will be really interesting to watch the space and see how that is impacted because, you know, and I'm really excited to see what some of the latest and greatest offerings are from the supplier side at Convention, particularly uh we have a great program that we'll be doing again this year called Venture Connect that is for startups. And so there's some really interesting things that are happening in that space as well. So travel data, as we know, is is incredibly messy. But I think that if we can get to a place where the technology makes it easier than going outside the program uh to book your travel, people will do that. You know, I think that at the end of the day, business travelers want something that's low lift. It's a seamless experience. Um, and if they can do that um and and make it uh easier and better uh in in terms of a booking experience to do within the program than outside of it, I do think that that's where uh we're headed.

Matt Brown 19:36

It's time for the mystery question. What's the most fun business trip you ever been on?

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Oh goodness.

Matt Brown 19:43

First thing.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

Well, um it I will say that uh it does a bleisure trip count of one thing.

Matt Brown 19:52

It absolutely does. This is inspired because I think you just came from Argentina, is that right? I don't I don't want there to be recency bias here, but it looked like a fun time was had by all and a lot of work, of course. But just just give me the give me one of your greatest hits.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Oh gosh. Well, um I attended the GBTA uh conference in Europe a couple years ago, um, which was in Copenhagen, and I really, really enjoyed that. Uh it was a a wonderful conference. Uh it's so interesting to attend and and get that European perspective on all of these different topics that we're you know touching on today. Um and uh I came in early and my husband joined me. So we had wonderful sightseeing the weekend before I um you know buckled down and attended the conference and went to education sessions and um made those connections as you do. Um, but it's a beautiful city, a wonderful city, uh, great food, uh, great attractions. And so I really enjoyed that.

Matt Brown 20:55

Catherine, good luck at the convention. We're rooting for you, and we'll hope to see you soon.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Absolutely. Thanks so much, you guys.