Airfare is up 15%, gas is past $4, and SAP Concur data shows business travel is quietly breaking

According to Q1 2026 numbers from SAP Concur, the platform that processes travel and expense data for millions of business travelers worldwide, fuel transaction costs jumped 14% in a single month, from $50 in February to $57 in March. Airfare was up 4%, hotels up 5%, and car rentals up 3%. Everything else was creeping higher, too.

But by April, with the Strait of Hormuz choked and gas racing past $4 a gallon, the real squeeze kicked in, and companies were now looking to offset those increased costs. “If airfare goes up by 15 or 20%, that automatically means that to stay within budget, I have to cut my trips by 15 or 20%,” Charlie Sultan, president of SAP Concur Travel, told Fortune.

Average domestic ticket prices climbed roughly 15% in April, while U.K. fares jumped 17–18%, just as travel to and from the Middle East cratered 30–40%.

“It’s not that people are spending less on travel,” Sultan said. “It’s that they’re spending about the same amount. They’re just not able to get as many trips as they were historically.”

Alternatives to driving

Concur’s data flashed warning signs weeks before the national average price per gallon crossed $4. That 14% fuel-transaction spike in February-to-March was an early-warning signal hiding in corporate expense reports, providing real-time, real-dollar evidence that the energy market was tightening before the war made it obvious.

This manifested in behavioral shifts as well. Car rental bookings dropped 4% in Q1 while rail bookings climbed 6%. Business travelers, especially in Europe, were quietly swapping cars for trains as fuel economics tipped. Sultan said the sustainability-conscious shift was especially visible among his European clients, but cautioned that rising gas costs were accelerating a trend, not creating one from scratch.

“I think the trade-off to now taking rail becomes a little more paramount,” he said.

Now, with gas averaging $4.52 nationally and topping $5 in six states, that substitution math has only gotten more aggressive.

Business travel is a $1.5 trillion global industry. When the per-trip cost inflates 15% overnight, and budgets stay flat, it creates a pullback that ripples into local economies thanks to the decrease of 15% in travel.

Sultan said the COVID-19 era taught corporate America a painful lesson about what happens when you stop showing up.

“My competitor is taking out my customer, and they’re wining them and dining them, and I haven’t visited this account for a while,” he said. “I think most companies realize, coming out of the COVID period, that they were hurting themselves by not traveling.”

Sultan said the full picture won’t be clear until September, when summer noise subsides, and business travel’s real trajectory becomes readable. Until then, companies are flying blind into the most expensive travel season in years.

“It’s hard to tell if this is going to be a long-term trend or sort of a one-month anomaly,” Sultan said.