📊 Up to 40% of your travel budget is meetings & events — the half most CFOs can't see. Can yours?

This week

On 10 September, Skift Meetings published a survey of 100+ in-house corporate event professionals with an uncomfortable headline: 31% of companies now spend more than $10 million a year on meetings, but only 20% have a formal meetings department to run them. It landed two weeks after Spotnana closed its acquisition of TROOP — a deal justified on the plain arithmetic that meetings and events can be up to 40% of a company's total annual travel spend, yet remain "largely unmanaged… ad hoc, distributed across teams," and typically absent from the strategic supplier negotiations that cover the other 60%. Put those two data points together and you get the quiet scandal of the 2026 travel program: the single largest slice of the T&E budget is the one nobody owns, nobody negotiates, and — because the smaller meetings get misfiled as ordinary "corporate travel" — nobody can actually see. The question for your 2027 budget is not whether M&E spend is growing. It is whether you can produce a number for it at all.

Why it matters

1. The biggest line item is the one with the least control. In the Skift data, 53% of event teams sit inside marketing, the average team is just 11 people, and 56% of companies lean on contractors to source venues and run registration. That is a category the size of the whole managed air program — up to 40% of travel spend — being run outside procurement, outside the TMC, and outside policy. As one respondent put it: "When nobody owns the meetings budget, nobody owns the ROI story either." The leverage you fight for on airfares and hotel rates is being left on the table on a bigger number.

2. The budgets are surging into that blind spot, not shrinking. FCM's 2026 Meetings & Events outlook has 92% of organisations expecting M&E budgets to hold steady or rise, and 35% planning increases of more than 10%. The share of organisations managing between $1M and $10M in meetings spend jumped 19 percentage points year over year. Business Travel Show Europe now finds more than 60% of travel and procurement professionals jointly responsible for travel and meetings — up from 50% a year ago. The mandate is arriving on procurement's desk faster than the tooling to handle it.

3. The invisible 40% is also invisible to your CSRD file. Business travel is Scope 3 Category 6 under ESRS E1 — and the flights, hotels and ground transport that make up an event are exactly that, just booked through a different door. The GHG Protocol even tells you to report events and conferences separately under "other." If the offsite in Lisbon and the sales kick-off in Frankfurt never entered the managed record, they never entered the emissions record either. The 2027 assurance conversation does not care which department booked the hotel; it asks for a number the auditor can reconstruct — and a category worth up to 40% of travel spend is not a rounding error you can footnote away.

What this means for your program

• Give the meetings budget an owner before you give it a tool. The Skift finding is not "buy software" — it is that 80% of companies have no one accountable for a category worth up to 40% of spend. Name the owner (procurement, travel, or a joint role, as 60% of your peers now have), then instrument what they own. Ownership without visibility is a spreadsheet; visibility without ownership is a dashboard nobody reads.
• Stop letting small meetings hide inside "travel." The misclassification the CFO can't see is a data problem you can fix at capture: tag event-related flights, hotels and vendor invoices as M&E the moment they post, so the category has a real line instead of leaking into general travel. You cannot negotiate — or report — a number you can't isolate.
• Bring event spend under the same policy and approval rails as transient travel. A conference dinner, a block of attendee hotel rooms, a venue deposit — route them through the same policy check, approval trail and export your booked travel already uses. The goal is one governed record, not two parallel worlds where 60% is managed and 40% is a shoebox of receipts.
• Put the emission factor on the event, not just the flight. If M&E is up to 40% of travel spend, it is a comparable share of your Category 6 footprint. Stamp cabin class, hotel nights and ground transport onto each event booking as it happens, so the assurance file reconciles instead of reverse-engineering a year of scattered card charges in Q1.

The numbers

• Meetings and events can be up to 40% of a company's total annual travel spend — yet remain "largely unmanaged… ad hoc, distributed across teams" and typically excluded from strategic supplier negotiations, per the rationale for Spotnana's TROOP acquisition (closed 26 August 2026). (Spotnana, PhocusWire, Business Travel News)
• 31% of companies spend more than $10M a year on meetings, but only 20% have a formal meetings department — with 53% of event teams sitting inside marketing, an average team of 11, and 56% relying on contractors, per Skift Meetings' September 2026 survey of 100+ in-house corporate event professionals. Smaller meetings get "misclassified as corporate travel spend," leaving CFOs with incomplete visibility. (Skift Meetings)
• 92% of organisations expect M&E budgets to hold steady or rise in 2026, and 35% are planning increases of more than 10% — while the share managing $1M–$10M in meetings spend rose 19 percentage points year over year, per FCM's 2026 Meetings & Events Trends report. (FCM Travel)
• More than 60% of corporate travel and procurement professionals are now jointly responsible for travel and meetings — up from 50% a year earlier, per Business Travel Show Europe research cited in the TROOP deal. (The Business Travel Magazine)
• Global business travel spending is forecast to hit a record $1.71 trillion in 2026 (+7.2%), driven by price rather than volume — US spend alone reaching $423B (+6.7%), per GBTA's 2026 forecast. Against that base, an unmeasured 40% M&E share is the biggest single reporting gap in the category. (GBTA)

Two tools built exactly for this moment

The reason the meetings 40% is invisible is structural: it is booked outside the TMC, paid on scattered cards and contractor invoices, and never lands in one governed record. That is a payments-and-expense problem before it is a meetings problem — and it is solved at the point of capture, not at year-end reconciliation.

• Travel Code Expense Management → — receipts, approvals, in-policy vs out-of-policy tagging against your own rules, Excel export, and every card transaction unified into a single view. The conference dinner, the venue deposit, the block of attendee rooms — they land in the same tracked, policy-checked record as your booked travel, with an M&E tag your CFO and your Scope 3 file can both read.
• Travel Code Net-60 Card → — real-time card feed with per-swipe visibility, budget rules with auto-freeze at 80%, and 60-day settlement at 0% interest. Give the event organiser a controlled card instead of a personal one, and the spend posts the moment it happens — categorised, inside a budget, and impossible to misfile as "just travel" three weeks later.

The bottom line

The industry spent 2026 arguing about premium cabins and NDC content — the visible 60% of the travel program, negotiated to the last basis point. Meanwhile the other 40% walked out the back door in the form of offsites, kick-offs and conferences that no one owned, no one negotiated, and no one could count. Spotnana paid to fold it back in; Skift measured just how exposed most companies are; FCM confirmed the budgets are rising straight into the gap. You do not need an acquisition to close it. You need an owner for the category and one governed record where every event flight, hotel night and vendor invoice lands the moment it posts — so the number exists before your 2027 budget, and your CSRD assurance file, is forced to ask for it.

What's new at Travel Code

Every receipt in one place — including the ones that used to hide in an event organiser's inbox. The Expenses module now runs OCR receipt parsing, automatic policy-compliance checks, admin approval routing and Excel export in a single flow — so a conference dinner or a venue deposit goes through the same policy check and lands in the same export as a booked flight, instead of surfacing as a mystery card charge in the year-end reconciliation. It is a small thing that quietly fixes a big one: the moment ad-hoc event spend has somewhere governed to land, the invisible 40% stops being invisible.

Sources

• Skift Meetings — Nearly a Third of Companies Are Spending $10 Million on Meetings. Few Have a Department to Run Them.
• Spotnana — Spotnana acquires TROOP
• PhocusWire — Spotnana acquires Troop to consolidate transient travel, meetings and events
• Business Travel News — Spotnana Acquires Meetings Platform Troop
• The Business Travel Magazine — Spotnana expands meetings and events capability with TROOP acquisition
• FCM Travel — Meetings and events budgets surging in 2026
• GBTA — Global Business Travel Spending to Hit Record $1.71 Trillion in 2026
• PlanA.Earth — Business travel emissions (Scope 3 Category 6)

Travel Code helps corporate travel and finance teams see, control, and reconcile every dollar of trip spend — in one platform. travel-code.com · Expense Management · Net-60 Card