Breakthroughs happen when people have the space to focus. But for anyone responsible for work travel, the day rarely unfolds as planned. You might start the morning expecting to meet with a hotel partner or prepare a deck for the C-suite, only to get pulled into the usual interruptions: a traveler asking whether a hotel is allowed, a manager forwarding a last-minute approval request, or someone booking the wrong dates and needing help to fix it.
These tasks keep trips moving, but they also pull you away from the work that drives impact. Instead of shaping strategy or improving the travel program, your day becomes a chain of small fires that demand immediate attention.
All of this adds up to shadow work: the invisible tasks that keep things running but quietly drain time and energy. Research from Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Perk, shows employees lose 7 hours per week to this kind of work.
Curious how you can get that time back? This article explores the most common shadow work tasks in travel management and how you can reduce them so you can focus on the work that truly moves your travel program forward.
1. Booking trips yourself (including group trips)
Booking travel is part of the job for many travel managers. But as the company grows, what used to be manageable can quickly turn into more than any one person can reasonably handle. A sales rep asks you to book their client visit. HR needs support arranging onboarding travel. Then an entire team is heading to an event and wants you to “just take care of it.”
Suddenly, you’re comparing routes and hotels, tracking preferences, collecting passport details, and coordinating schedules — all while trying to make multiple itineraries fit into one budget. Booking itself isn’t the issue. It’s the manual, high-touch work around it that turns a necessary task into hours of shadow work.
The consequences
Hours lost to manual research and coordination
Zero scalability as the company grows
A constant feeling of being responsible for everyone’s logistics
Stress from being blamed when preferences aren’t met
Booking trips might be part of the job, but the way it’s done today often makes it unsustainable.
When travelers can book independently and guardrails work in the background, you stay in control of the program without becoming a bottleneck, freeing up hours for higher-impact work.
2. Clarifying travel policy… again
You spent time getting your travel policy right. You aligned with finance and HR, wrote everything up in a clear document, and shared it with the whole company. On paper, it should work.
But here’s what actually happens:
A traveler Slacks you: “Is this hotel okay to book? It’s only $10 over the limit…”
Another messages, “I can’t find anything under the price cap. It’s high season in New York.”
A manager forwards an urgent email: “Can you approve this before end of day?”
Instead of the policy doing the work, you become the policy.
The consequences
Constant interruptions with similar questions
Policy enforcement depends on how busy you are
Travelers treat the policy as negotiable
Less time to review or update the policy itself
When the policy lives inside the booking experience, it works quietly in the background. Travelers get clarity, managers stay in control, and you get fewer interruptions.
If you want to go deeper, there's a guide on how to automate your travel policy to reduce shadow work.
3. Getting stuck in endless approval chains
This one often goes hand in hand with policy adoption. Even when a policy exists, many organizations still require a travel manager or team lead to manually approve each trip.
Picture this: a traveler submits an approval request while you’re boarding a flight. You lose coverage. When you reconnect, you have five messages from the traveler asking for an update. Meanwhile, the fare has gone up.
The consequences
You’re pulled away from whatever you were doing.
Trips get delayed, increasing costs.
You’re stuck mediating between travelers and approvers.
Approvals feel arbitrary rather than strategic.
When approvals depend on manual back-and-forth, they create a bottleneck. Instead of supporting business travel, you end up coordinating messages across Slack, email, and your booking tool.
When approvals follow policy automatically, the process becomes faster and more predictable — and you're no longer stuck mediating every request.
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4. Fixing booking mistakes
Even in the best-run programs, people make mistakes when they book. And more often than not, those mistakes land on your desk.
A traveler books their ticket as “Tom,” but their passport says “Thomas.” No one notices until check-in. Now there’s a name mismatch, and they might not be allowed to board. Suddenly, you're waiting on hold with the airline, hoping they can fix the ticket without fees or a reissue.
Helping travelers isn’t the issue. The problem is how much time and stress these errors create.
The consequences
Time spent fixing preventable issues
Stress when errors appear close to departure
Travelers relying on you for every correction
Money lost on change fees or reissued tickets
A modern travel setup can’t stop every mistake, but it makes them far easier to handle — giving you more time for the real work.
5. Manually handling travel disruptions
Disruptions are unavoidable. In 2025, 89% of business travelers were affected by some kind of disruption. Without the right systems in place, each delay or cancellation quickly becomes your emergency to solve.
Imagine this: you’re at home in the evening when a traveler messages you in a panic. Their flight is delayed, then canceled, and they need to make an early meeting. Within minutes, you're searching for alternatives and trying to rebook before options disappear.
Helping travelers is absolutely part of the job. The problem is when you become the unofficial after-hours response center for every disruption, with no tools or support to absorb the load.
The consequences
Evenings and personal time repeatedly interrupted
Pressure to “fix it fast”
Burnout from constant context switching
Modern tools take much of the legwork out of disruption management. Travelers get timely support, and your evenings stay your own.
Want to learn more? Our Travel Disruption Report shares data-led insights and practical tips for building more resilient travel plans.
6. Chasing receipts and invoices
It often starts with one missing document. A traveler forgets a restaurant receipt. Another can’t find their train receipt. You chase a hotel for an invoice they still haven’t sent. Suddenly, your afternoon becomes a scavenger hunt across Slack threads and email chains.
You didn’t sign up to be the receipt and invoice police, but that’s exactly how it starts to feel.
The consequences
Hours lost to reminders, follow-ups
Month-end close delayed because documentation is scattered
Stress from needing clean records but receiving incomplete info
Low confidence that your travel spend data is complete and accurate
It’s not just you. Employees rank filling expense claims as one of their biggest points of frustration, which explains why this shadow work keeps landing back on your plate.
When receipts and invoices flow in automatically, you spend far less time chasing paperwork and more time running your program.
7. Manually creating or updating travel reports
This is one of the most time-consuming and least visible forms of shadow work. At month-end or quarter-end, leadership wants answers:
Are we overspending?Are we staying within budget by department, project, or region?
But spend sits in one tool, bookings in another, invoices in someone’s inbox, and notes in a spreadsheet only you can decipher. You spend hours exporting CSVs, cleaning columns, matching trips to cost centers, and checking numbers that never quite line up.
You’re a travel manager, not a finance analyst, yet you’re expected to produce clear, confident reports using systems that were never designed to work together.
The consequences
Hours lost to manual consolidation
Reporting becomes reactive
Worrying about gaps or inconsistencies
Hard to prove program value
Fragmentation becomes painfully clear
This is a classic case of fragmentation turning into shadow work. In our research, most employees reported using four different tools to manage shadow work, and only 7% said their stack was well integrated. Travel reporting sits right in the middle of that problem.
When travel and spend data live in one place, reporting gets easier. You finally have the numbers to show your program’s impact — and the headspace to keep improving it.
Clear the shadow work, enable real breakthroughs
Each of these shadow work tasks pulls you away from your real responsibilities. Remove enough of them, and your role shifts from reactive to strategic.
Eliminating shadow work doesn’t mean adding more tools. It means building a travel ecosystem where routine processes run automatically in the background:
Built-in travel policies
Automated approvals
Flexible booking options
Self-service changes
24/7 direct traveler support
Unified travel and spend data
Real-time reporting
Duty of care visibility across all trips
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When these pieces work together, travel managers can focus again on insights, strategy, and the improvements that move the program forward. That is where breakthroughs happen.
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