In February 1964, four Liverpudlian men in their early 20s boarded a plane at Heathrow bound for New York. On paper, a pedant could argue it was just another business trip. But when The Beatles stepped onto the tarmac at JFK airport, they triggered the British Invasion, changed popular culture and redefined the economics of the music industry. 

It’s a clear reminder that the return on investment (ROI) of business travel isn’t always captured in the ticket price. Sometimes the true value of a trip is only realised with hindsight, whether that’s in the relationships built, the momentum created, or the doors opened.

That’s the real challenge with business travel ROI. How is it measured? The frame of reference is often too narrow, as if it were only about cost reduction or revenue growth. 

Fab formula?

Direct travel is easy to justify. A salesperson meeting a prospect. Researchers collaborating in the lab. These trips directly correlate to revenue, delivery or growth. 

Indirect travel is trickier. Compliance checks, support functions, internal projects: these trips don’t have an obvious connection to trading performance. They risk being seen as unnecessary overhead. Managers are left weighing up purpose and value in a fog of subjectivity. 

It’s why convenient ROI formulae fall apart. You can measure a deal signed, but you can’t quantify the morale boost of a team meeting face-to-face and what it ultimately delivers. This is judgement, not arithmetic.

“You can measure a deal signed, but you can’t quantify the morale boost of a team meeting face-to-face”

The discipline lies in asking hard questions before approving a trip. What will be gained by travelling? What will change if it doesn’t happen? And even who is travelling? 

As an industry, that’s possibly the right question to ask ourselves. After all, how many travel events do we go to where we meet the same people every time? Should we not be leading by example and suggesting a colleague who hasn’t had their ticket to ride before should make the trip?

That’s why reframing ROI is so important. The real question isn’t “what’s the ROI of travel?” in the abstract. It’s “what is this trip meant to achieve, and does it ladder up to our core purpose?”.

Travel tied directly to sales, delivery and client retention has a justifiable return. Travel outside that sphere isn’t automatically wrong, but it demands sharper scrutiny, especially in lean times. 

Here, there and everywhere

Travel is too important to be reduced to a cost centre. Handled wisely, it is a growth engine. Cut it for the comfort of the accountants and you risk interrupting the rhythm that drives momentum.

Sometimes the wisest move is simply to let it be, accept that not every trip has a calculable ROI, but that some carry strategic weight that only hindsight will reveal.

The Beatles’ first flight to New York didn’t just justify its cost, it transformed everything that came after. And in business, as in music, the real ROI often comes when people come together. If that isn’t the climax of the argument for business travel, I don’t know what is.

Martin Ferguson is Managing Partner Kintela Group, a communications and events specialist set up earlier this year. Before this he was VP Global Communications, Public Affairs and Global Events for American Express GBT and previously worked for Sabre and for various travel trade publications.