The digital revolution intended to make traveling for work faster. Instead, we’re facing a digital overload that’s fuelling shadow work for business travelers.
In this article, we explore why your tech stack might be slowing you down and how app consolidation and automation can help you reclaim your time from the inefficiencies of shadow work.
When digital tools cause digital friction
When jumping across fragmented apps to arrange flights, manage separate hotel bookings, and track expenses, tools that are meant to speed up processes are often slowing down people who travel for work and causing ‘digital friction’.
Digital friction is the outcome and effort of needing to use too many tools and technologies at once, rather than having a single, simple solution. This fragmentation creates an endless stream of invisible tasks that we call ‘shadow work’ – the work behind the work. From hunting down expense receipts to digging for confirmation emails, it’s all the things that need to be done when working across multiple systems – but are not meaningful or fulfilling elements of everyday work.
Fragmented business travel technology
There are lots of ways you might end up using tech while planning travel for work, while away and even returning from your trip. Without an all-in-one tool, you end up managing things across separate platforms, such as:
Booking sites to compare and reserve flights
Individual hotel apps to manage accommodations
Ride-hailing and car rental portals to get around while away
Expense management apps to scan and track receipts
Email apps to hunt for confirmation letters
Corporate bank apps to monitor spending
Separate rail or transit tools to navigate local travel
Employee communication platforms to liaise with colleagues and travel managers while on your trip
Switching between systems and trying to manually maintain consistency across asynchronous tools can create cognitive drain for teams managing business travel tech, also increasing the risk of oversights and errors.
The cost of shadow work
Time and resources lost due to digital friction when traveling for work and using business travel management tools add up. Working with Forrester, our Cost of Shadow Work report found that employees planning, booking, and managing business travel lose an average of 129 minutes to shadow work each time they go through their workflow – and this rises to 135 minutes per employee in the US.
This has a serious impact on workflow and productivity:
Across the countries studied, shadow work costs businesses $1.7 trillion every year
Just 6% of travel booking tasks are fully automated, despite being a leading cause of shadow work
67% of respondents in our report said that booking travel for work, filing expenses, managing invoices, and organizing team events are the most frustrating types of shadow work
It takes 11 minutes on average to refocus after completing one of these tasks
Only 7% of people say their company has a well-integrated tech stack
Employees using 6+ tools are significantly more likely to describe their systems as complex and ineffective
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Source: The Cost of Shadow Work (September 2025), a Forrester Consulting study sponsored by Perk.
Why shadow work persists in a digital world
Technology fragmentation has been cited as the single biggest challenge facing the travel sector. 34% of people surveyed identified the complexity of integrating various technological systems as the industry's primary obstacle.
While other areas of business have benefitted from automation, travel has struggled to keep pace.
The biggest contributors to digital shadow work that could be improved with automation include:
Manual data entry
Even with digital tools, work travelers are still stuck typing in receipt dates, amounts and tax codes.
Juggling emails, apps and PDFs
When apps require you to manually forward confirmation emails or upload PDFs rather than syncing them automatically.
Invoice chasing
Platforms that book the trip but leave the traveler to hunt down invoices separately so they can share with finance teams.
Cross-tool reconciliation
Having to manually compare data and information between a booking site, email confirmation, credit card statement and an expense app.
Fragmented itineraries
Digital tools that only handle one part of the trip, forcing travelers to manually stitch together flights, hotels, activities and car rentals.
Travel technology trends
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The increasing advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has huge potential to reduce shadow work for business travelers.
According to Deloitte’s travel outlook, traveler use of generative AI for trip planning has already doubled year over year, while companies prioritizing AI and automation are seeing gains in efficiency.
A key technology trend is agentic AI. A McKinsey study relays how this can help the travel sector:
Agentic AI can autonomously make decisions and take the initiative to accomplish goals, using multistep reasoning while undertaking complex actions
To execute tasks, agentic AI can call on external tools, APIs, and systems
Agentic AI can store and recall long-term, structured memories that track context, progress, and user preferences, allowing it to deeply personalize its responses and to handle requests spread across multiple sessions
Companies should look at how the technology can supercharge their existing tools instead of piling on more AI-powered apps. The goal isn’t more tech but actually using automation to erase the digital friction that’s already there.
The link between shadow work and burnout
Shadow work isn’t just a distraction. 45% of the employees we surveyed also felt burnt out as a result of it.
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Source: The Cost of Shadow Work (September 2025), a Forrester Consulting study sponsored by Perk.
Burnout can occur if work travelers feel pushed beyond their limits, with the amount of extra tasks causing stress and exhaustion. The World Health Organization defines it as an occupational phenomenon; “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
Burnout can have a real impact on wellbeing, productivity and general engagement. It can be displayed as:
Energy depletion or exhaustion
Negative feelings about your job or workplace
Reduced professional efficacy
This fatigue is widespread. A global workforce trends report found that 83% of workers feel at least some degree of burnout, with 48% saying this is related to workload.
If workers are already managing burnout, shadow work caused by work trips is not just a minor inconvenience, but a direct hit to their mental energy.
Centralizing your digital tools
The right digital tools should eliminate shadow work, not create more of it. Centralizing your business travel technology means you can book and manage your work trip in one place, cutting out the digital friction of a fragmented tech stack.
With Perk, you can:
Plan work travel on one platform with integrated itineraries and built-in budgets
Rebook or cancel flights and hotels in just a few taps
Use our concierge service to organize trip options that aren’t available yet like airport transfers, Airbnbs, buses and even ferries
Make the most of our AI features to complete tasks like expenses almost instantly
Receive live travel updates to stay in the know as you go
Opt in to Green Trip and offset your work travel emissions for a fraction of your trip’s total cost
How teams are winning back their time
For LUSH, Perk's solution gave employees an optimized booking experience. Rather than scrolling through several websites, Perk acts as a one-stop shop: offering travelers a comprehensive inventory of flights, accommodation, and ground transportation.
Perk also helped FREENOW win back 40% of their time by simplifying their travel booking. Employees can now book their own travel arrangements via Perk, and it also eliminates the finance team’s need to track down flight or hotel invoices or figure out which provider issued them.
Perk takes care of the work behind your work, giving you the time to focus on what actually matters while you’re away.
For more resources to help you when traveling for work, explore our beginner's guide to business travel or our guide to travel and expense management.
Written by
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Growth Marketing Director
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