SAP Concur 2026 Survey: Why Business Travel Is Now a Governance Question

SAP has framed its eighth annual SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey around a growing paradox in business travel. Employees still value the trip, while the support, safety, and accountability model around it strains to keep up. The numbers make the tension concrete. The survey shows that while 93% of business travelers say work trips improve their mental or physical well-being, 67% say they feel hesitant to travel for business this year, citing safety concerns around geopolitical conflict (31%), the likelihood of disruptions like flight delays (28%), and worries over visas, immigration status, and digital IDs (16%). For SAP teams running SAP Concur inside broader Spend Management programs, that gap is a governance issue.

The scale makes the question consequential. According to SAPinsider research, 37% of surveyed SAP cloud customers report using SAP Concur, and 24% plan to add it to extend their existing ERP investments in the context of a 2026 migration. Additionally, a sizable installed base is making related configuration and policy decisions within the same planning window described in the SAP Concur survey.

The Paradox Appears Structural

The survey’s headline framing, that travel is both valued and stressful, translates into a practical tension inside the travel-and-expense operating model. Travelers expect more support: 27% now hold their employer most accountable for protecting their safety on the road, up from 18% when a similar question was asked in 2020. However, the Finance function sees it differently. Only 38% of CFOs say their organization is completely responsible for ensuring employee safety while traveling, with the majority placing that responsibility primarily on employees. Both positions can be defended. Both land in the same policy and workflow model.

In practice, an ERP program manager adding SAP Concur as part of a broader transformation may be asked to consolidate several mandates into a single rule set, and the default tendency can be to favor the function with direct budget ownership. The survey suggests that this creates friction when traveler expectations are treated as downstream exceptions. That is where the PDF containing the travel policy can become a system of record for human nuance.

Investment Is Rising Faster Than Alignment

Money is not the constraint. Nearly all CFOs surveyed (97%) say business travel is important to their organization’s overall growth strategy, and 82% expect their travel budget to increase this year. But scrutiny is rising alongside spend: 89% of CFOs agree that travel managers need to justify better how business travel helps the organization meet its goals.

The people asked to prove that value say they are under-resourced. From the travel manager’s seat, 86% are concerned their organization is not doing enough to protect employee safety, and 84% agree it is impossible to fully meet business goals without more backing from finance leadership. Their top stated needs are revealing: better data and insights to demonstrate ROI (44%), training on effective AI use (43%), greater buy-in on policy changes (42%), and updated technology solutions (40%). Two of those four are governance and tooling problems that sit squarely inside an SAP Concur configuration.

Cloud Footprint Raises the Stakes

SAPinsider data indicates a majority of surveyed T&E workloads run on hyperscaler infrastructure, making these applications a notable part of the SAP customer cloud footprint. That does not automatically change travel policy but places SAP Concur configuration, integration, analytics, and workflow decisions within a faster-moving operating environment.

For SAP shops, a practical implication is that configuration can evolve more quickly than policy ownership is revisited. Travel teams may adjust booking rules. Finance may adjust approval thresholds. HR may contribute duty-of-care language. IT may manage integrations with ERP and related systems. The survey’s paradox lands in the gap between these owners, where accountability for the traveler’s overall experience of policy can be distributed rather than defined. The data sharpens that point: 79% of travelers are at least somewhat comfortable with employers tracking their location to protect their safety, yet 29% say real-time monitoring of location and expenses would cause them to lose trust in leadership. The same SAP Concur configuration choices that enable duty of care can erode trust if no one owns the line.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Treat the next SAP Concur configuration review as a governance deliverable. The survey’s hard numbers Reveal a misalignment: 97% of CFOs consider travel strategic, 82% are raising budgets, yet only 38% accept full responsibility for traveler safety. In comparison, 86% of travel managers fear the organization is not doing enough. For an ERP program manager standing up SAP Concur inside a 2026 migration, that is the warning. If booking rules, approval thresholds, duty-of-care language, and integrations are each owned by a different function with no shared cadence, the system will encode the disagreement rather than resolve it. Make policy ownership visible across Finance, HR, Travel, and IT before go-live, and designate a single forum to decide how often policies change and how exceptions are interpreted.

Read exception and trust signals as data because the survey says employees already are. Finance leads should stop treating exception volume as noise. With 27% of travelers now holding their employer most accountable for safety (up from 18% in 2020) and 29% saying real-time monitoring would erode their trust in leadership, every approval override and every tracking setting is an employee-experience decision. So, A T&E control that quietly absorbs legitimate flexibility requests, or a location-tracking configuration nobody explained, can cost trust faster than it saves money. Therefore, SAPinsiders should review exception patterns quarterly and pair any monitoring or duty-of-care setting with a clear, communicated rationale.

Map the SAP Concur integration points before the policy moves through them. Enterprise architects carry the part of this paradox that does not show up in a survey deck. Travel managers’ top unmet needs (ROI data at 44%, AI-use training at 43%, and updated technology at 40%) are integration and analytics problems that live where SAP Concur connects to ERP and HR systems. With a majority of T&E workloads now running on hyperscaler infrastructure, configuration changes faster than governance does. Document how a policy change propagates across SAP Concur, ERP, and HR before it is applied function by function, so duty of care, expense controls, and traveler data handling stay consistent across the stack rather than drifting apart.