Bleisure travel: balancing flexibility and cost control

I’ve done my fair share of business travelling over the years. As a full-time remote worker, work trips offer opportunities to connect with peers and take advantage of the inspiration that comes from in-person brainstorming sessions, office life, and after-work get-togethers.

However, that’s not the only thing that makes business travel enjoyable. Whenever I’m travelling, I try to make the most of the trip, whether that’s with some sightseeing or visiting a bookshop. I treat it as a mini-vacation, a break from the routine back home. And I’m not alone in this. In 2024, a third of Gen Z and Millennials travelling for business planned to extend their trips to enjoy leisure time outside of their professional obligations.

This combination of business and leisure travel has been dubbed bleisure, and while it’s a great opportunity for employees, it introduces new challenges to finance teams. Receipts from multiple dates, different currencies and more, making it challenging to determine which ones are business-related.

The bleisure travel market is expected to grow to $671.22 billion by 2029.

With bleisure continuing its rising trend, finance teams now face a pressing question: how can they remain flexible and allow employees to enjoy their trips and maintain cost control? The answer is simple: technology can fill those gaps.

Bleisure travel refers to employees extending their work trips for personal time, whether that’s by adding extra days to their trip to explore the destination, engage in leisure activities before or after meetings, or even bringing someone along.

The term was coined and first used by The Future Laboratory in a trend report from 2009, and has been more or less observed in business travels since then. But it wasn’t until businesses started adopting more flexible work policies during the COVID-19 pandemic that bleisure saw a big popularity boost. Remote and hybrid environments paired with less rigid schedules have made it easier for people to work from places other than the office and outside the typical 9-to-5 schedule, which means that travelling doesn’t disrupt their work as much as it might have done before.

According to The Business Research Company’s “Bleisure Travel Global Market Report 2025”, the bleisure travel market was worth $430.86 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow to $671.22 billion by 2029. The report attributes this rising trend not only to flexible work arrangements, but also to an increased focus on people’s well-being and talent retention. This shows that while bleisure is a perk for employees, it can also bring benefits to the employer.

If you think of a business trip in the more classic sense of the word, that likely translates to two or three days packed with meetings and networking, leaving little time for rest or other personal activities. Turning it into a bleisure trip contributes to a better work-life balance by giving people an opportunity to relax and explore their destination, helping them recharge before going back home.

According to Jeanne Liu of the Global Business Travel Association, who spoke to the BBC about the topic, “travel wellbeing relates to job satisfaction, which means people stay productive and stay longer in their jobs.” In addition to including leisure activities, Liu suggests that “being able to take your kids or your family, to add some fun elements to a trip, makes that trip much less stressful.” This way, employees can still enjoy quality time together with their loved ones that might otherwise be lost to business commitments.

A day of leisure helps employees relax and alleviate some stress, but it can also boost the knowledge they’ve gained from the trip. Heather Larson, president and CEO of Meet Chicago Northwest, gives the following example during an interview for CBS 2 News Chicago: “Allowing [employees] to take that time […] to ruminate on some of the learnings they might have gained at the conference and think about how they might be able to implement some of those processes, efficiencies and become a little bit more profitable. There’s your benefit for the employer.”

Allowing business trips to be used for personal time fosters trust in managers and supports talent retention.

But that’s not the only one. Achieving an ideal work-life balance and allowing business trips to be used for personal time fosters trust in managers and supports talent retention, particularly among younger generations. A study on blended travel by Crowne Plaza Hotels and Resorts shows that 65% of Millennials and 59% of Gen Z-ers are more inclined to work for a company that gives them frequent and/or flexible travel opportunities as a perk.

For finance leaders, bleisure can help achieve cost optimisation. Most employees choose to stay at the same hotel for the duration of their trip, which means businesses get better rates due to longer stays. The same applies to flights, as prices vary significantly depending on the day. If travel dates are more flexible, businesses can book cheaper flights on dates that accommodate employees’ preferences.

Finally, bleisure travel can benefit Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives. Travel date flexibility allows businesses to book flights with reduced carbon emissions, resulting in fewer flights overall, as employees are already using business trips for personal purposes and don’t need to book extra time off. From a social perspective, as already mentioned, bleisure contributes to improved employee well-being and job satisfaction. On the governance side, bleisure helps support local economies and promotes transparency and compliance, as only a well-defined travel policy can enable businesses to properly manage costs and protect all parties involved.

While bleisure travel bring great benefits to both employees and employers, it’s also adding a new layer of complexity for finance teams managing expenses. What used to be straightforward business trips now often include personal elements that cause expense lines to overlap, such as extending hotel stays, splitting flight costs to include a plus-one, or having dual-purpose meals.

Traditional expense reporting systems struggle to distinguish between what’s reimbursable and what’s personal spending, and inconsistent expense categories make forecasting and ESG tracking harder. As a result, finance teams are left with noisy data and harder to reconcile audit trails, which slows reimbursements and increases the risk of errors.

With the global bleisure market expected to keep growing, so will the data it generates. To manage this, finance teams need better visibility over the travel data they’re managing. That means adopting tools that can sort through submitted expenses and quickly recognise what the company should cover and what it shouldn’t. This way, finance professionals can be sure they’re working with reliable data and making confident business decisions.

Today’s financial performance is defined by data confidence. Expense data that’s incomplete, duplicated, or misclassified can affect policy compliance, distort budget forecasting, and complicate board reporting.

Bleisure travel can further amplify these challenges, because it introduces ambiguity into expense claims. For example, is an extra hotel night justified by professional obligations, or is it leisure? Does a lunch with a friend who is also a business partner count as work or as a personal catch-up? And who decides which is which? Depending on who’s reviewing the expense report, you might get different answers to these questions and reimburse expenses for one employee and not for another, which isn’t a fair or efficient process.

With the global bleisure market expected to keep growing, finance teams need better visibility over the travel data they’re managing.

This is where AI can step in. AI finance tools can reduce that ambiguity by applying the same logic consistently across every report, removing bias and ensuring each expense claim is thoroughly handled. In doing so, finance teams can be confident in their data’s accuracy and spend less time manually checking and validating expense claims and more time on responsibilities AI can’t handle.

AI brings a new dimension to expense management that combines scale, speed, and intelligence, and automates day-to-day tasks. As business travel becomes more complex, especially with bleisure travel increasing, AI automation can deliver the consistency that manual checks can’t match.

Where human review might miss patterns or struggle with high data volumes or inconsistencies, AI analyses spend in real time, flags anomalies early on, and gives finance teams the confidence to act fast. AI-powered expense monitoring solutions like Rydoo Smart Audit can automatically detect duplicates, weekend claims and other non-compliant travel extensions, mismatched currencies, as well as compare transactions against policy rules and identify anomalies that need to be reviewed by a human.

AI automation can deliver the consistency that manual checks can’t match.

What was once a reactive process of identifying problems only after reimbursements were issued is now a proactive one that reduces errors, improves consistency and makes it easier to comply with travel-related business policies.

Most importantly, AI helps eliminate the guesswork associated with bleisure travel. Every flagged expense is supported by a consistent logic, reducing the risk of bias or oversight, and allowing finance teams to make travel reimbursement decisions with more confidence.

AI’s purpose isn’t to replace human judgment or finance teams altogether. Rather, it’s meant to give them more time, help their productivity while still maintaining control over their budgets.

AI reduces manual labour by taking on the more repetitive and time-consuming tasks like scanning receipts, matching transactions, checking for expense policy alignment, and spotting inconsistent claims. But it doesn’t make the final decision on anything; that’s still in the hands of finance professionals. It’s them, not the AI, who interpret the data and identify the trends that then allow them to adjust travel policies, educate employees, and communicate the financial impact of business travel to leadership.

AI’s purpose isn’t to replace human judgment or finance teams altogether.

As powerful as they are, AI tools still can’t mimic a human’s empathy and flexibility which are needed in any process that involves other people. And in the case of bleisure travel, where employees’ professional and personal lives overlap, that human context is key. AI can flag an anomaly, but it’s the finance professional who decides whether it’s a mistake, an exception, or an opportunity to improve the process.

Unbeknownst to me, as I sat in my hotel bed enjoying my latest literary purchase, I was experiencing a bleisure trip before I even had a name for that type of travelling. It’s a perk many take advantage of, so finance teams must keep adapting their processes to match more complex travel expenses.

AI brings the clarity; it surfaces what matters, filters out what doesn’t, and ensures every forecast, report, and policy decision is supported by reliable data. That’s not to say it will police how employees travel, but rather that it helps finance stay in control of costs while managing flexible travel options.

And it’s clear that bleisure is here to stay, and I will gladly continue to take advantage of it. Because, while seeing colleagues face-to-face is great, it’s the personal experiences you get out of those trips that make them enjoyable and relaxing.