Company bosses still regard cutting travel costs as a major priority. In a poll of 650 travel managers in 12 countries, 54% said saving money was the "most common expectation" of their senior executives.
The survey was carried out by travel management company Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) as part of its annual Business Travel Indicator.
The poll revealed that a global travel programmes were also a high priority among many companies.
A good majority of travel managers (62%) said their companies were standardising travel policy at some level. This was through global consolidation (26%), gradually consolidating region by region (16%) and consolidating as the need arose (20%).
Besides the travel managers, CWT's survey also questioned 2100 business travellers in the 12 countries which included five in Europe: the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
A majority of all those quizzed said they expected business travel to either stay the same or increase in 2006.
Of the travel managers, 60% said they expected their spending to increase this year despite pressure from senior executives.
The travel managers also said that technologically advanced security check-ins, like the use of fingerprint or iris scans, would be widely used within five years while 83% said they thought "virtually all" bookings would be made online within that time.
But European travellers were almost equally divided among those who did or did not use online booking.
32% said they never booked online, with the main reason being that they had someone who did it for them.
But nearly a third said they used online booking between 61% and 100% of the time.
For their part, the travellers said that airport security queues (25%) and flight delays (24%) were the two most negative aspects of travelling. A poor work-life balance and levels of service also featured as major negative factors.
The poll also revealed that European business travellers are among the least frequent users of low costs carriers. Only 9% of Europeans said they used them for more than 60% of their travel while 47% said they never used them.
Globally 81% of travel managers said they rarely or never used low cost carriers.