Flight Prices Are Out of Your Control. Your Corporate Connectivity Bill Isn’t

Airfares jumped 24% in a single week in March 2026. The average business ticket now sits at $465 — levels not seen since 2019. And with crude oil surpassing $100 a barrel for the first time in three years, there’s no reason to expect relief before summer.

Finance teams know this. Travel managers know this. CFOs are already fielding questions about it. But the conversation is missing something.

While everyone is focused on the line item they can see — the flight — there’s another cost silently eating through the same budget. One that nobody approved, nobody forecasted, and almost nobody is managing.

Why Flight Costs Are Rising and Won’t Stabilise Quickly

The immediate driver is oil. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes — sent crude prices above $100 a barrel in early March 2026. Jet fuel, refined directly from crude, jumped 7.1% in a single week to $209 per barrel.

To put that in operational terms: filling a Boeing 737-800 went from approximately $17,000 to over $27,000 in under a week.

Fuel already accounts for up to 30% of an airline’s total operating cost. When it spikes this fast, airlines don’t absorb it — they pass it on. Surcharges are returning on long-haul routes. Base fares on high-demand corridors are quietly rising. And even when the geopolitical situation stabilises, supply chain disruptions mean fuel costs won’t drop quickly.

IATA had projected jet fuel demand to grow nearly 4% in both 2025 and 2026 before this latest shock. The volatility isn’t a blip — it’s the baseline.

The CFO Problem: Rising Costs, Diminishing Control

Global corporate travel spend is projected to exceed $1.5 trillion in 2026. And yet 54% of travel managers now cite rising costs as their single biggest concern — up from 48% just a year ago.

CFOs are increasingly questioning ROI. SAP Concur’s research across 600 CFOs found that tolerance is replacing enthusiasm when it comes to travel spend. The question is no longer “how do we grow travel” — it’s “how do we justify every trip and eliminate every unnecessary cost?”

The pressure is real. Budget scrutiny has moved upstream. What used to be a line item review is now a strategic conversation. And that conversation needs a sharper answer than “we can’t control airfares.”

The Hidden Inefficiency Nobody Is Managing

Here’s where the story gets interesting — and where the real opportunity sits.

Most enterprise travel budgets are built around the visible costs: flights, hotels, ground transport. But buried inside those same budgets, and inside countless expense reports, is a cost category that gets almost no systematic attention: mobile data and international roaming.

The roaming problem

International roaming charges can run into hundreds — sometimes thousands — of dollars per trip. Multiply that across dozens or hundreds of travelling employees, and you’re looking at a material, recurring, unforecasted expense. These charges typically surface after the trip. By then, finance teams are reconciling costs they never planned for.

Employees buying their own data

Without a clear corporate connectivity policy, many employees solve the problem themselves — buying local SIMs, using airport Wi-Fi, or running up roaming charges on their corporate plan. None of it is coordinated. None of it is visible to the business in real time. All of it is being expensed.

Expense chaos at scale

Only 18% of business travellers consistently book via approved company platforms. The rest are making individual decisions — about connectivity included. This fragmentation is a compliance issue as much as a cost issue. And as trip volumes grow, the chaos compounds.

Connectivity Is One of the Few Costs You Can Actually Control

Here’s the insight that changes the framing: you cannot negotiate with OPEC. You cannot control what airlines do when oil prices spike. You cannot dictate the surcharges they attach or the fares they set for peak summer routes.

But you can control how your organisation connects globally. Every time an employee travels, the connectivity cost is either managed — or it isn’t. Right now, for most enterprises, it isn’t.

This is where corporate travel data management shifts from a nice-to-have to a hard commercial decision. Centralised data pooling, corporate eSIM deployment, and visibility over mobile spend don’t just reduce costs — they remove the unpredictability that’s making travel budgets so difficult to forecast and defend.

A Smarter Approach: Centralised Global Connectivity

The solution isn’t complicated. It’s consolidation. When global connectivity is managed centrally — through pooled corporate data plans, eSIM technology, and a single visibility layer across all travelling employees — several things happen at once:

Roaming charges are replaced with predictable, pre-agreed rates. Data usage across the travelling workforce is pooled rather than siloed, so no individual employee runs out while another wastes their allowance. Finance teams see spend in real time, not weeks later on an expense report. And employees stop making ad hoc connectivity decisions that create both cost and security risk.

This is what enterprise travel data management actually looks like in practice.

Control What You Can Control

The corporate travel budget has taken on new strategic weight. With oil-driven airfare volatility likely to persist through 2026, CFOs and procurement leaders need to identify every lever that is genuinely within their control.

Flights aren’t one of them. Global connectivity is.

Every trip your employees take is an opportunity to either manage connectivity spend intelligently — or to absorb another unplanned bill. At scale, that difference is significant. Not because the cost per trip is enormous, but because the cumulative effect of unmanaged connectivity across a global workforce compounds quietly and consistently.

The organisations that come out of this period of travel cost pressure in the strongest position won’t necessarily be the ones who flew less. They’ll be the ones who found the controllable costs, drew a clear line around them, and managed them with the same rigour they apply to everything else.