In 2025, air tickets booked worldwide by the Copenhagen-based travel purchasing consortium TravelpoolEurope on behalf of its 35 corporate members rose 9 per cent year over year. But bookings to the US fell 20 per cent.
Across the Atlantic, Canadian applications for the Nexus trusted traveller programme for entry to the US in 2025 halved from 696,000 in 2024 to 344,000. "Business travel is not slowing down globally, but going into the United States there's a very significant downtrend," said Francis Harrison, the Toronto-based regional security director for North America for risk management company World Travel Protection.
For decades, business travel – which has been a reflection of nations that are partners in trade – has been supercharged by economic globalisation. But such assumptions are weakening. Countries like Denmark and Canada no longer are sure they can consider the US a partner. As Canadian prime minister Mark Carney told last month's World Economic Forum in Davos, "great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited."
The challenges described by Carney create profound questions not only for trade but by extension where and how smoothly companies travel, the security of their travellers and perhaps even their choice of service providers.
On the most basic level of travel continuity, said Paul Mutter, a New York-based risk analyst for travel risk intelligence provider Riskline, "we're seeing a deterioration of an environment that was pretty stable and is now subject to small but sudden shifts based almost entirely on US policy changes that happen at the last minute."
President Donald Trump's newly discovered appetite for foreign military intervention – sometimes actual, sometimes threatened – is one example. But so too is his arsenal of sanctions against nations that incur his displeasure.
Mutter warned businesses to expect threats to impede the flow not only of trade but also of people through travel bans on entire nations. "We saw this last year in disputes with Colombia, South Sudan and several other countries," he said. "The frequency is going to increase. It's very difficult to plan for them, because if you do it all might get walked back. For Colombia, it took only a few weeks for that to happen."
Will corporate travel to the US decline?
The obvious temptation for businesses is to avoid a country whose administration sees "value in uncertainty," as Trump's own chief trade envoy Jamieson Greer put it in an interview in the Economist last month. It is a point not unnoticed by China, whose officials frequently invoked "stability" when prime minister Keir Starmer led a UK trade delegation to Beijing in January.
There are reasons beyond tariff threats for businesses to stay away from Trump's America. There are restrictions on immigration visas from 75 countries, and foreign workers who are admitted are vulnerable. An immigration raid on a Hyundai/LG plant in Georgia in September 2025, in which 300-plus South Korean workers were detained, some in shackles, illustrated the concern of companies which invest in the US.
Meanwhile, said Mutter, "scientists and journalists have been deported. People will be less willing to take risks, especially if you can have a conference elsewhere, for example."
"Everyone in Denmark says they don't want to go to the US at the moment," agreed Søren Schødt, managing director of TravelpoolEurope. Schødt cited revulsion at Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Minnesota, stricter border controls, moves to peruse visitors' social media feeds and, of course, threats to annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.
Perhaps most off-putting has been punitive action by Trump against major Danish companies, including pharma giant Novo Nordisk and green energy leader Ørsted. "The way he has bullied them because he can't get his way on Greenland means people are saying, 'Let's not build a wind farm in the US right now,' " said Schødt. "There are lots of other places we can invest, like India. It's too uncertain. Danes will keep what they have in the US, but their future investment will be elsewhere."
Yet there are reasons to keep trading with and travelling to the world's largest economy. According to figures from Eurostat and Morgan Stanley quoted in The Economist last month, the value of European foreign direct investment in the US grew from $2.8 trillion in 2018 to $3.6 trillion in 2024. US share of the revenue of European companies increased from 16 per cent to 20 per cent over the same period. Canada succeeded in reducing the proportion of its exports that go to the US in 2025 by 9 per cent year over year, yet the US still counts for 67 per cent of its exports.
With caveats that 2026 figures may look very different and services figures are not yet available, trade expert David Henig, director of the UK Trade Policy Project, told BTN that the flow of goods between the US and the rest of the world ended 2025 "in line with normal fluctuations." Albeit, it seems to have stabilised at a slightly lower level, he said.
"Trump actually exempted an awful lot from his tariffs in the end. There's no obvious sign of Trump upending the world order as has been described or changing the trade flows. It's not dramatically reshaped everything," Henig said.
Schødt pointed out that the pricing hit from tariffs in any case has been negated by the dollar's plunge in value in recent months. However, the uncertainty caused by constant tariff threats, rather than the tariffs themselves, is likely to deter smaller companies, although "bigger companies are carrying on for now," said Henig. "Trump is noisy and a bit of an obstruction, but in many cases you can find ways around."
While Denmark and Canada may have especially good reason to reduce travel to the US, the trend may not be universal. "The US continues to account for around 22 per cent of our business travel sales, a figure that has remained steady despite some fluctuations over the past year," said Mel Quinn, director of corporate in the UK for travel management company Travel Counsellors for Business.
Mutter agreed that perspective is needed. "All this doom and gloom is going to be on the margins," he said. "It's going to be in general huge volumes of people moving to and from the United States as well as capital and other forms of investment and intellectual property, because the desire for normalcy is so incredibly strong that it involves a lot of whistling past the warning signs."
"A different world order" – the call of Asia
Nevertheless, many US trading partners are "rapidly diversifying abroad," as Carney put it in his Davos speech. Carney listed numerous deals either concluded or under negotiation in Europe, Latin America and, above all, Asia. The European Union announced deals in January with India and Mercosur, although the latter has been delayed by the European Parliament.
Elsewhere, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are building fast as service hubs. "There's a huge amount of folk travelling to and from the Gulf for business every week," said Henig.
Quinn also is seeing geographical diversification. "What we're seeing is more of a rebalancing of travel rather than a reduction," she said. "Small and midsize enterprises remain internationally ambitious, but they're more selective about where they invest their time when markets feel politically or economically complex." Growth for her clients is strong especially to Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Above all else looms the biggest trend in global trade: "a different world order that's substantially more Asian," said Henig. Leading them all is China, the largest trading partner of more than 120 countries, according to the Wilson Center.
To reduce reliance on the US, other Western countries are overcoming their squeamishness about human rights and espionage to rebuild links with China that they had severed in recent years. China has encouraged inbound travel to strengthen relationships. It has dropped visa requirements for stays of up to 30 days for passport holders from about 50 countries.
Yet Western companies must trade and travel carefully. On Starmer's Chinese mission last month, UK government officials were equipped with burner phones and temporary e-mail addresses.
Unease about overexposure to China, the US or both means that "the macro trend right now in large global businesses is to regionalise their command and control, to be able to move production or finances to meet whatever's going on geopolitically across those markets," said Bruce McIndoe, founder and president of McIndoe Risk Advisory. "A lot of global travel is going to become intra-regional."
McIndoe also expects more domestic business travel as companies retreat. According to The Economist, capital spending on domestic projects by US-based multinationals has shot up from 44 per cent in 2016 to 69 per cent today.
Practical effects on managed travel programmes
The obvious consequence of global uncertainty for travel managers is to put crisis management plans and risk adviser support on alert for everything from travel bans to traveller deportations to evacuation in the case of military violence or social uprisings. The US's threat to bomb Iran, and Iran's threat to respond through regional conflagration, arguably is the most pressing example.
Other precautions include giving travellers security training and preparing briefings for destinations where once that might have been considered unnecessary. "A number of organisations have had very significant concerns around travelling to the United States for their work. We've built a risk management programme around them and their travellers," said Harrison.
Briefings for US-bound visitors have included destination tips and advice on editing social media output. While the need to do so for a country which lectures others aggressively on the virtues of its First Amendment may provoke particular astonishment, Harrison warned that "any number of Global North countries are employing tools to screen people. If you have strong views of the administration of a certain country, you need to be prepared to remove them or travel with a burner device."
Meanwhile, McIndoe projected the corporate trend to restructure into autonomous regions would be mirrored in reorganisations of travel programmes. "Regional teams will have primary responsibility for managing travel, which is largely where the travel budget will be," he said. "They're also going to be dealing with regional providers."
Taylor Consulting Solutions managing director Ami Taylor agreed that travel managers will gravitate towards regional service providers, a key motivation being the quest for what she terms "digital sovereignty" at both corporate and governmental level.
"The EU is one example where they're looking to really improve that digital sovereignty, including having more data living within the boundaries of the region," she said. "From a travel perspective, the public sector will probably be the first to reduce the data they transfer across borders. I think we'll see large enterprises also take on that idea."
Schødt saw Taylor's prediction come true in January. "Some of our data is stored [by tech providers] on US servers, and we have asked for it to be moved to European servers," he said. "Some of our members have told us they will not accept storage on US servers anymore."
Taylor advised buyers to consult with relevant internal stakeholders such as IT, compliance and data protection to understand their thinking on this issue, as it could limit which service providers they can hire in future. Given contracts with such providers are often long-term, "make sure termination clauses allow for flexibility, and during the RFP process ask your potential supplier what it's doing to prepare for digital sovereignty," Taylor said.