The changing corporate travel landscape embraces the trend towards the workation, bleisure trips and more specifically longer-term arrangements brought about largely by younger employees keen to become digital nomads.
While the appetite for international remote work is growing, so too are determined efforts by corporations to maintain their talent pool. The cost of recruitment is much higher than the cost of keeping existing employees, so employers must flex and pivot to accommodate new working environments and maintain employee satisfaction levels.
Research from Ipsos UK and American Express GBT last spring found demand for more flexible working is widespread across the workforce. Based on 1,000 business travelers resident in the US and 817 business travelers resident in the UK, demand for blended travel stems from all age groups as almost two thirds (62 percent) of US and UK business travelers have extended work trips for leisure and half (52 percent) have incorporated work into leisure trips. Long-haul is a favored bleisure opportunity as is tacking on leisure time to conferences.
According to Christine Sikes, COO of Direct Travel, international remote work is growing particularly among knowledge workers, leadership and hard-to-retain talent. She believes that multiple factors are driving the trend: “Hybrid work normalization, employee expectations for flexibility, burnout mitigation, and competitive talent markets.”
Digital natives tend to go where the cost of living is cheaper. Be aware, however, that the challenges of this trend are many and varied, and the realities can get quite messy if not tackled systematically.
Who Cares?
When blended or bleisure travel trips incorporate a leisure portion to a business trip, it’s essential for the employer to know when their duty of care starts and ends. If the leisure portion of the trip is booked through non-corporate booking channels, the resultant lack of visibility could be a real issue, for example if there cropped up a need for any emergency response.
The traveler may leave the city once work is finished and move to a resort hotel not covered by the original risk assessment, be joined by other family members, use unsecured WiFi, be outside insurance coverage and outside policy too.
It’s crucial to get on top of this. explains Dr. John Rose, chief risk advisor at travel management company ALTOUR. “Blended travel introduces duty of care ambiguity because risk does not recognize the line between business and leisure, and if portions of the trip sit outside managed channels, visibility and response capability erode quickly.”
Rose says the organizations handling this well are not restricting flexibility. Rather, they are defining clear policy boundaries and maintaining continuous traveler visibility so they can prepare, monitor, and respond across the entire trip lifecycle.
Jorge Mesa, senior director of travel risk management at BCD Travel, concurs: “Once employees deviate from the official itinerary, the risk environment changes,” he says.
“This shift requires organizations to adopt a broader, person-centric approach to risk management. The focus is no longer solely on the ‘trip’ but on the employee’s complete journey, including personal extensions and remote work days. Duty of care extends to ensuring that employees have access to safety information, emergency support, cybersecurity protections, and clear policy boundaries at all times,” Mesa advises.
Neil Hammond, partner at Goldspring Consulting, highlights another concern over additional family members: “Are they documented and provisioned for in an emergency requiring evacuation or healthcare?”
And, of course, the company must decide who pays for the leisure portion of the trip, the additional nights, any personal extras, any upgrades, etc. “We have seen some policies set a clear delineation for the liability and cost be requiring that side leisure trips start and return to the same location on the business trip itinerary and also that the leisure portion is no longer than the business portion of the trip,” says Goldspring’s Hammond.
There is no hard and fast rule how companies are responding, says Beth Marino, chief operating officer at Fox World Travel, leading some companies, with an eye on employee retention, to split the cost. “Ultimately, the goal for many companies is to offer bleisure travel as a benefit. As employees’ expectations about business travel begin to change, travel organizations cannot put the employee or company at risk,” Marino cautions.
“Due to the complexity of duty of care, bleisure travel needs to be addressed in a company policy,” Marino says. “Comparably, splitting the costs is much simpler and some organizations allow associates to take advantage of some travel vendor discounts (hotel, car) while on the personal side of the trip.”
However, Marino notes, “We’ve noticed with so much discussion of the bleisure travel trend, few policies fully address all the aspects of blended travel,” she concludes.
The Tax Man Cometh
“Remote work overseas brings tax, visa and compliance headaches,” warns Jo Lloyd, global head of FCM Consulting. “Even short stints in another country can trigger tax residency, breach immigration rules, or put company data at risk on unsecured networks.”
And that’s just for starters. There are multi-jurisdiction taxes, length of stay restrictions, insurance, and visa and passport changes due to tightened cross-border scrutiny. These trips can open a veritable can of worms.
“Companies should also think about employment law exposure (e.g., local labor rights that might get triggered unintentionally), data sovereignty rules, and the complexity of traveler tracking when their itinerary stops being linear,” advises Rich Johnson, head of client solutions at consultancy Festive Road.
NOBL Travel uncovered some of the challenges in their report, The Tax Truth About Working From a Beach. Highlights include the fact that Spain’s 24 percent “tax break” excludes most digital nomads and only applies to salaried employees, not the freelancers who make up 70 percent of remote workers.
Another is the 183-day trap nobody mentions – stay six months anywhere and you’re suddenly paying local taxes on worldwide income (up to 47 percent in some countries).
The key is not to prevent bleisure; that would be a mistake, believes Altour’s Rose. The answer is structured flexibility, not prohibition, he maintains, because when companies try to block blended travel outright, they simply push it outside managed systems and lose visibility.
“We are seeing a clear divide: Some organizations are attempting to restrict extensions outright, while more forward-thinking clients are embracing structured flexibility with defined guardrails around compliance, cost and duty of care,” Rose says. “The most effective programs recognize that unmanaged blended travel creates far greater risk than governed flexibility aligned to how people actually work today.”
Bright Lines…
Bleisure trips and long-term remote employment are complicated issues, but the combined might of HR, legal and corporate security departments can keep track of them. Reputational damage is at stake as well as shortfalls in insurance coverage and increased legal exposure.
“Best practice is to require full-trip registration, continuous risk monitoring, consistent cybersecurity protocols, and clear communication on insurance boundaries, while using managed platforms that separate business and leisure spend but preserve governance and duty-of-care oversight across the entire journey,” Rose advises.
Simple comparisons can separate the cost of a bleisure/blended trip says FCM Consulting’s Lloyd. “A side-by-side comparison of the costs for business-only and blended trips can clarify what’s reimbursable. Splitting bookings between business and leisure segments at the time of reservation helps ensure everything is above board.”
It’s easy to see why some employers treat bleisure as an additional perk and pay the additional TMC booking fees, the additional risk management monitoring and the extra on-trip assistance if needed.
As far as the other challenges raised, there are protocols and processes that will track these out-of-policy trips. For example, more mature programs will introduce a pre-trip approval for the bleisure component that clearly outlines the dates, destinations and travelers to create a clear paper trail for internal governance.
“Bleisure typically requires explicit pre-approval, separation of business vs. personal days, and acknowledgement of policy and liability boundaries,” says Direct Travel’s Sikes. She also advises that location disclosure during workdays should be mandated.
Some OBTs allow employees to select the dates for personal travel and pay for that portion of the trip with their own card, while the business expenses go to the company account. This means accounting teams don’t have to spend time manually reconciling expenses or tracking down proof of purchase, such as invoices or receipts. Everything is cleanly categorized up front, making reporting and reconciliation effortless.
… And Blurred Boundaries
Still, there are areas where corporate responsibilities overlap the personal trip. A company must ensure the traveler is on the right visa – business and/or leisure? – that insurance doesn’t lapse once the business portion of the trip ends, that you can split bills, segregate potential taxable benefits to employees, correctly attribute expenses as personal and/or business and have cybersecurity issues covered by ensuring the traveler is not relying on unsecured networks or personal devices.
Additionally, there could be tax implications, too, and many organizations set limits on how long staff can work from elsewhere, typically between 15 and 90 days, as a safeguard against tax complications.
If a traveler overstays their welcome in a country, companies may be fined if employees remain in a country without the correct status or documentation.
Companies can manage employee expectations with clear and transparent policies. International remote working triggers a combination of duty of care and duty of loyalty, says BCD’s Mesa. “ISO 31030 highlights this shared responsibility: ‘The responsibilities of travelers to cooperate and act in compliance with the organization’s TRM policy and procedures should also be set out.’ This is sometimes referred to as duty of loyalty,” he explains.
“When employees work internationally – often outside controlled office environments – the same health, safety and ergonomic principles should apply. This includes adequate equipment, suitable workspace, defined working hours and reporting obligations.”
Mesa says that companies should also consider the following:
• Employment Law Triggers: Working from another country can inadvertently establish a local employment relationship or trigger labor law protections, minimum wage rules, or mandatory benefits.
• Permanent Establishment Risk: Regular or prolonged work from a foreign country can create a taxable business presence, with significant corporate tax implications.
• Data sovereignty and regulatory compliance: Some jurisdictions restrict where data can be stored or accessed from (e.g., GDPR, local data residency rules). Remote work from an unapproved country can create unintentional violations.
• Health and safety obligations abroad: Companies may be responsible for ensuring remote workplaces meet local H&S standards, which can vary significantly.
• Security and infrastructure limitations: Unreliable power, unstable Internet, or political/security risks can affect employee safety and productivity.
• Inconsistent travel/medical coverage: Employee assistance programs and insurance may not cover personal extensions or extended stays unless formally approved.
The need to tackle this issue is not going away. “Clarifying policies, tightening approvals, increasing traveler tracking, separating liability clearly, and using technology to regain visibility without blocking flexibility” are how companies are responding says Sikes.
Hybrid mobility is the future, says Rose, and there is an upside for traveling employees as he believes that when structured right it can increase productivity and engagement.
“Blended travel is not inherently risky – unmanaged blended travel is,” Rose warns. “The organizations that will lead in this next phase of corporate mobility are those aligning travel, HR, legal, risk, and IT within a unified governance framework where visibility, policy clarity, and technology enable flexibility and compliance to coexist.”
