Gen Z Business Travelers Are Anxious, and Brands Aren’t Helping

Skift Take Gen Z business travelers are anxious and uncertain, navigating booking systems and policies built for a different generation. What they want isn't more technology — it's clarity, guidance and a little reassurance along the way. Gen Z may be early in their careers, but their impact has already begun to shape the future of business travel. They’re taking multiple business trips a year, and their annual trip volume is on track to double by 2030, when the full generation is of working age. In most cases, business trips are a positive experience — that is, once the traveler is in the air or at the destination. But the infrastructure they encounter when booking and managing their work trips was built for a different cohort. Gen Z struggles with opaque policy guidelines, imperfect automation, and disconnected paths to purchase. At the same time, AI is not the silver bullet it might appear to be. Gen Z is more skeptical of AI than millennials and, despite feeling anxious about planning, they do not want decisions to be automated on their behalf. Instead, they want assistance in the form of guidance, control and clarity in the decision-making process. It appears that w