The merging of travel and mobility management

Geopolitical uncertainty, tighter travel budgets and increased regulatory compliance are reshaping business travel – and how it is being managed. Findings from BTN Europe’s latest Salary & Job Satisfaction Survey indicate that travel managers now oversee an ever-expanding portfolio of responsibilities that extend well beyond procurement to also encompass the broader field of mobility.

Confusingly, the term ‘mobility’ has multiple uses in corporate travel, referring to both transport options on the ground and to the movement and relocation of travellers and their immigration requirements. Neither of them are straightforward tasks, and the latter is increasingly complex.

Yet, according to mobility management platform ECA International, corporates increasingly view mobility as key to fuelling business growth. A recent survey by the company also found that 60 per cent of firms consider global mobility management “challenging or very challenging” and a further 95 per cent now outsource at least one mobility function to combat skills shortages and support growth objectives.

Similarly, research from German travel management association VDR indicated mobility is a “strategic focus” for a growing number of corporates. The association’s survey of 800 companies revealed 70 per cent are “actively” addressing commuter mobility and 69 per cent are also working on process optimisation. By the end of 2025 the latter is expected to rise to 82 per cent, indicating a shift towards what the association calls “holistic mobility”.

“The travel management department is special [because] it covers the entire mobility of a company and requires coordination with many internal interfaces,” says Christoph Carnier, VDR president and head of procurement for travel, fleet & events at Merck Group.

Carnier believes travel and mobility management function must be both strategic and operational. “On the one hand, it is important to have a clear strategic direction, but then it also has to be implemented, and for that, operational tasks are required,” he says.

Finding a home for mobility

This evolution in responsibilities has sparked a governance debate: where should the travel and mobility function reside?

In most cases, Carnier notes that travel management is part of the procurement department but cautions that "the task of travel management does not end with the conclusion of a contract, as that is when the real work begins."

Kathleen Stilmant, director of travel and expense at French consultancy Axys Odyssey, believes HR is its natural home, especially as hybrid work blurs the lines between commuting and business travel.

“It makes sense to have someone in charge of the end-to-end process,” she explains, but warns the move should be strategic, and not driven by cost cutting measures.

“We’ve seen travel managers given more responsibility, but this is often without additional resources or training,” she says.

Stilmant argues that HR’s employee-centric approach, rather than the cost-focused lens of procurement, aligns more closely with a combined travel and mobility role.

“They need to put themselves in the employees’ shoes – and that’s the objective of HR. Procurement, on the other hand, can sometimes overlook the user experience,” she believes.

Ford’s holistic approach

Ford Motor Company global travel manager Stephen Swift took hold of immigration and tax compliance issues in the wake of Brexit and has since integrated mobility compliance into the company’s travel approval process.

“The big challenge is the additional time and bureaucracy that it takes to be compliant in a world where borders are increasingly more difficult to cross,” he says.

“Especially with the recent change in the US administration, there's an awful amount of work happening to make sure that anyone who has a visa has the right visa, and that it's up to date.”

For Ford’s UK-based employees, Swift said this new era of post-Brexit-induced bureaucracy has added “friction points” for business travel across Europe, noting travellers now face interviews and documentation checks at borders they once crossed with ease.

“It's a much more intrusive process – nothing like business travellers have been used to before – and it requires a lot more information… this puts a big drag on how the company is able to operate,” he says.

To remove as much “noise” from this process as possible, Swift worked with ECA’s Comply platform to build a new global pre-trip approval system that contains immigration and tax compliance checks as well as a trip cost estimator based on Ford’s own expense data. Where necessary, additional support for travellers is triggered via API links to the company’s relocation partners and tax providers.

Swift also prioritised risk management in developing the tool, which he said addresses three types of risks: individual traveller safety, corporate legal exposure and reputational damage – “we don’t want Ford on the front page of any newspaper because we’re not playing by the rules,” he explains.

With 42,000 traveller profiles and an average of 2,000 trips per week, Swift says the tool has delivered efficiency gains for both travellers and travel approvers.

But compliance comes at a cost. “At a time when every company is looking at reducing cost and bureaucracy, we're not making many friends [internally] because we're seen as increasing bureaucracy and increasing costs,” he says. “But we're doing the right thing by keeping the company compliant and our employees safe.”

Commuting comes into the fold

Despite the recent watering down of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), some countries are enforcing stricter local rules around sustainable mobility, which is also forcing companies to bring the ‘other’ mobility – ground transport and commuting – together with travel more tightly under one roof.

The Netherlands’ new ‘reporting obligation for work-related mobility of persons’ (WPM), for example, requires corporates with more than 100 employees to submit mileage and expense data from both business travel and commuting. As part of the WPM regulation, corporates are also expected to encourage the use of public transport.

Italy’s PSCL (Home-Work Travel Plan), meanwhile, is a requirement for corporates with more than 100 employees to reduce commuter traffic and encourage sustainable transport alternatives. PSCL implementation is the remit of a ‘mobility manager’, who in many cases, is also the travel manager, according to Ivano Gallino, president of country’s business travel association, AITMM.

Italy has gone a step further. The country’s standardisation body, UNI, in April published a standard pertaining to the skills, knowledge and responsibilities required for “managing the mobility of people”. The UNI 11977:2025 standard defines competencies for four roles: travel manager, mobility manager, fleet manager, and the overarching chief fleet mobility travel officer – or chief FMT officer – which combines all three functions.

According to Gallino, the standard marks “a crucial step” towards the recognition and certification of key roles in corporate travel and mobility management.

Enereco’s end-to-end model

At Enereco, an Italian oil and gas engineering firm, Liliana Rojas embodies this convergence. As the company’s travel and mobility manager, she oversees everything from business travel and immigration compliance to fleet management and commuting.

“I do it all,” she says. “It can’t be piecemeal because if disruption occurs it has a domino effect, and you risk losing pieces along the way.”

With 250 frequent business travellers, technical personnel posted to high-risk destinations across Africa and Middle East and a company fleet of 180 vehicles, Rojas said “it’s quite a commitment”, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“From the moment a travel request is made, I look after the employee – this includes booking travel, organising visas and educating the traveller about the destination and its socio-cultural norms,” she explains.

Before Rojas joined the company in 2011, she says “everyone managed their own trip, and it was a huge mess”.  Today, she manages the entire process in-house and, given the size of the organisation, said this approach works better than a self-booking tool.

Her integrated role also allows her to leverage spend for better rates as well as quicker response times from suppliers when things go awry. She also has full oversight on traveller safety and wellbeing and developed a travel risk app with Enereco’s IT team.

“This sends a red alert to let us know if our travellers are in trouble, especially when abroad or in places that are not always very safe,” she explains.

Rojas reports directly to the company’s president, which she said underscores the importance of her role because “we don’t move things; we move people”.