Every year, the GBTA conference is a useful opportunity to step outside of the day-to-day and listen closely to what Travel Managers are thinking about and where the industry is headed.
This year, one theme came through especially clearly to me: small and midsize meetings are becoming a much bigger part of the travel management conversation.
Many Travel Managers who historically focused on corporate transient travel are now taking on responsibility for the travel for meetings and events as well. That means a broader scope, more stakeholders involved, more travel spend to understand, and often a category that has not been managed with the same structure as traditional business travel.
At TROOP, we spend a lot of time thinking about the meetings and events space, so I was interested in how consistently the same challenges came up in conversations at GBTA.
Small meetings (fewer than 50 attendees) have always existed. What is changing is the level of attention they are getting and who oversees them.
Team offsites, leadership meetings, trainings, and regional gatherings are often planned by Executive Assistants, Chiefs of Staff, department leads, or other employees who are not professional meeting planners. These planners still need to make decisions about location, travel, budget, accommodations, and attendees. But in many organizations, they are doing that with spreadsheets, emails, scattered online research, and disconnected tools.
For the Travel Manager, that creates a visibility problem.
You may be responsible for the overall travel program, but still have limited insight into which in-person meetings are being planned, where people are traveling to and from, or how much is being spent.
At the same time, the answer cannot be for Travel Managers to take over managing the travel of every small meeting. Most teams do not have that bandwidth.
What I heard at GBTA was a desire for a better middle ground: give planners the tools to work independently and make good decisions, while ensuring those decisions align with company policy and budget expectations.
A recurring theme in our GBTA conversations was the need to reduce the number of systems meeting planners move between as a meeting comes together.
A planner may research destinations, look at flights, compare hotel costs, build a budget, source a venue, coordinate with attendees, and eventually move into booking. Too often, each of those steps are managed across different tools.
TROOP started with what sounds like a simple question: where is the best place for a team to meet? But as we worked more closely with meeting planners, it became clear that location was only one part of a much larger workflow.
Integrated travel sourcing and booking are an important part of making that workflow more efficient.
The easier it becomes for a meeting planner to move from researching a meeting to sourcing it, booking it, and managing the details, the more productive that planner can be.
This approach also provides more visibility into meeting data for the Travel Manager. When travel data and meeting data live separately, it becomes difficult to understand total spend or report consistently across the program.
Bringing those workflows closer together creates better visibility for the organization and a simpler experience for the traveler.
AI was part of many conversations and sessions at GBTA. What struck me was how practical those conversations have become. Travel Managers are no longer asking 'How can we use AI for travel management?' Instead t are asking, ‘Where can AI save time, reduce manual work, and make my programs more efficient.’
Meetings and events are a natural area for that innovation because planning them still involves a significant amount of manual research, comparison, and coordination.
AI can help reduce that manual workload, but I do not believe the future is simply adding an AI assistant on top of an already fragmented workflow. The real opportunity is to combine AI with travel data, meeting data, policies, and existing workflows. That is where Travel Managers and AI can start making decisions easier, not just generating more information.
Taken together, these conversations point to a broader business travel trend: business travel and meetings are moving closer together in how they are managed, and who oversees them.
Organizations need better visibility into small meetings. Planners need to be able to work faster without relying on fragmented tools and processes. Travelers need a more consistent experience. And Travel Managers need a clearer picture of activity and spend across both corporate transient travel and meetings.
Our vision at TROOP is to bring those stakeholders together: the planner, the Travel Manager, the attendee, and the supplier.
Small meetings do not need the complexity of a major event management program. But they also should not remain an unmanaged blind spot.
If there was one message I took away from GBTA 2026, it is that the industry is ready to solve that problem.