HeadBox has released a white paper exploring the challenges facing the global business travel industry which reveals that meetings and events remain a significant strategic blind spot for global organisations.
The AI-powered B2B meetings and events platform’s report, Global Perspectives: How Travel Managers Are Tackling Meetings & Events, draws on insights from eight experienced travel managers at major companies including Microsoft, EY and Fidelity.
According to 2025 data from Cvent, some 91% of travel managers are now tasked with overseeing meetings and events, yet most lack the necessary infrastructure to manage this role effectively.
HeadBox’s white paper argues that while travel programmes are well integrated, meetings and events management is often fragmented across departments like HR, marketing and finance, and travel managers are thus left with scattered oversight or control.
“This whitepaper is a call to action,” said Andrew Needham, CEO and Founder of HeadBox. “The technology, the expertise and the frameworks exist right now to bring meetings and events into the same strategic conversation as business travel.”
The five key obstacles
The report identifies five structural hurdles currently preventing M&E from being integrated into a cohesive corporate strategy:
- Delayed visibility
Meetings and events costs are often distributed across various regional teams and tools meaning spend is only fully visible too long after the event has taken place.
- Fragmented ownership
Responsibility for booking venues and suppliers is often diluted across a variety of teams, creating inconsistent supplier contracts, eroded buying power and governance gaps – all of which increase risk.
- The compliance gap
Corporate travel operates in strict formal frameworks, but with meetings and events, a lack of formal framework can undermine the credibility of leadership when trying to enforce wider travel policies and give rise to other problems.
- Cultural resistance
Moving M&E into a managed framework is, HeadBox writes, often met with pushback. For many stakeholders and executive assistants, the process of planning events is seen as personal and the report notes that top-down enforcement often fails.
- A lack of defined success
Many travel managers have had M&E added to their remit without being given clear KPIs or benchmarks. Without these metrics, it is difficult for managers to prove the value of their oversight, secure the necessary resources, or align events with broader business goals.
The way forward
The white paper suggests that travel managers must close the gap between event planning and traditional business travel management.
The report recommends that organisations stop viewing meetings and events as a peripheral activity and start treating it as a strategic priority, which would involve adopting similar or identical technological frameworks used for business travel.
