Introduction

Late last year, I sat down with Dr. Vanja Bogicevic from New York University for the Corporate Insights Podcast.  I met Vanja several years ago at a Business Travel News event where she shared travel trends and research from NYU.  Since first meeting, I’ve had an opportunity to guest lecture in a number of her classes in New York.  Her broad scope and knowledge of the corporate travel market were the primary reasons I wanted her to join me on the podcast.

During our discussion, we covered everything from her path into hospitality education to why her students get more hands on time with real technology than most of us did in our first jobs. We also talked about a project she was working on with Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association (HEDNA) that, at the time, was still under wraps.

That study was released at their conference in Orlando last month. Titled “The Value of Corporate Travel 2025,” the findings provide  a clean set of signals about where corporate hotel demand is going, how hotels should think about value, and why the industry needs better definitions before we argue about the data again.

Here are five highlights I summarized from our conversation, plus what the newly released HEDNA NYU research adds to the story.

Teach the tools and language before the internship

Vanja described why NYU built a hands-on learning environment through its Hospitality Innovation Hub and experiential learning lab. The goal is simple: students should not meet the core systems of hospitality for the first time when they are already on the job. They should understand the tools, the industry vernacular, the data, and the workflows early, so they can contribute faster with smarter questions when they enter the workforce.  As someone who has spent a career in travel tech (from the agency side to distribution and corporate lodging), I love this approach.

Make research stop living in the lab

One of Vanja’s most important points was tied to the benefits of closing the gap between academic research and industry problems. Instead of academics picking topics in isolation, her model is to ask partners what problems they are seeing, then bring those questions into capstone projects and applied research.  NYU now brings this approach towards engagements with a number of leading hospitality providers, including HRS Stay, Work & Pay, to learn more about the real-world problems that exist and how we and the industry are working to solve them.  This is how she produces reports that people actually read, instead of papers that don’t go further than academia.

Invest in your network, as your network = your net worth

Vanja shared advice she gives students constantly: stay open minded, engage early, and build relationships before you need them. Career paths in hospitality rarely follow the straight line students imagine in their first semester.  If you want a simple strategy, it is this: show up, ask smart questions, follow up, and do it again. The industry is resilient, but your opportunities expand in direct proportion to the people who will pick up the phone for you or connect you to someone on LinkedIn.  Already in the last six months, I’ve connected a dozen students with executives from my network to try and ensure their resumes are read by people who hold the potential to impact their careers in our industry

AI needs better signals, not louder hype

On AI, Vanja stayed grounded. Chatbots are fine, but the bigger opportunity is using AI to improve signals inside hospitality systems. One example from our discussion: flagging likely corporate behavior even when an account is not labeled as corporate. Done responsibly, that could improve targeting and reporting, and it could reduce the number of debates that start with, “Well, your definition of channel is different than mine…”

The Corporate Channel Shift

As we wrapped our podcast taping last fall, we touched on the research that is now public -  “The Value of Corporate Travel 2025.”  The study revealed that corporate travel isn’t just important, but that it’s growing. The report outlines negotiated corporate travel as a high value target and describes a mindset shift in hospitality, away from pure volume and toward high value growth.

What was surprising in this report is that between 2023 and 2025, corporate and consortia room nights shifted away from property direct channels and toward Global Distribution Systems, with GDS overtaking Direct as the leading channel for corporate room nights. This trend shows up even among loyalty program members, which is a polite way of saying loyalty alone does not guarantee direct bookings.

I suspect part of this is because in managed travel, the workflow often includes a TMC, a corporate policy, duty of care, and a system of record (PNR or trip locator). We also should give credit to corporate hotel program leaders who doubtlessly have taken steps – sometimes incremental, sometimes more encompassing – to communicate to travelers and admins RE the importance of booking in preferred channels.

The report also leans into value, not just share. It points to higher revenue per stay, driven by meaningful net ADR growth, and it positions negotiated corporate as premium demand that hotels can win by focusing on traveler behavior and by optimizing distribution strategy.

There is a practical implication in this report. If a hotel’s revenue team still evaluates corporate travel mainly through the lens of rate and room nights, they are missing the full picture. Value shows up in length of stay, booking patterns, cancellation behavior, spend patterns (including ancillary spend during stays), and the ability to plan inventory. The report notes booking behavior differences, with corporate travelers booking less last minute and often booking further out, which can support yield and staffing decisions.

It also flags a visibility challenge that anyone in corporate travel will recognize instantly. Unmanaged travel and out of policy activity are harder to isolate, which distorts both channel attribution and the true cost of acquisition when you try to compare apples to apples.  This is one of the reasons that HRS focuses on the convergence of spend, making it easier to understand holistically.

So…this is not a story about one channel winning, but about how the corporate segment is continuing to evolve. Here are other highlights from this report available here.

If you’d like to listen to my full discussion with Dr. Vanja Bogicevic, check it out here:

Spotify: https://okt.to/5bmCOW

Apple: https://okt.to/OpEQmk

Thanks for reading this week!

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