Business travel gamification offers companies a way to incentivize travel policy compliance.
If you’re searching for effective ways to encourage travel policy compliance, consider introducing travel gamification elements. The need for innovative engagement strategies is clear: a Deloitte study reports that of business travellers who were aware of an approved corporate booking tool, 44% still chose to book through unmanaged channels. And when asked why they made this decision, drivers included factors like loyalty points, special deals, and ease of shopping.
With gamification of travel planning, you can draw attention back to approved channels using competition, interaction and rewards. Gamification strategy goes beyond booking channels, with tools like badges and leaderboards improving staff engagement with travel policies, approved apps and training tools.
But why is travel gamification effective, and how does it work? In this guide, we’ll discuss ways to build gamification into your business travel policy. Using game mechanics and cost-saving incentives, you’ll be able to increase compliance, motivation, and engagement.
Gamification introduces game-like elements into non-gaming scenarios. It’s a useful strategy in numerous industries and situations, including the travel industry.
You’ve probably already participated in gamified marketing. One key example of gamification in tourism is the use of airline loyalty programmes. Beyond awarding points for booking flights, airlines encourage further interaction by granting travel credits for completing surveys, engaging with social media, or achieving milestones like visiting new destinations.
In the case of business travel, gamification would involve instituting a rewards system for completing defined goals as part of the travel planning, booking, and expense reporting process. The primary goal is to motivate business travellers using interactive tools and incentives, using digital innovation to create a fun and engaging experience.
What does this look like in practice? Employees might receive points each time they use an approved booking tool. As points add up, they can be exchanged for prizes like gift certificates or vouchers. This gives a tangible incentive to comply with company travel policy.
Or for trips involving pre-trip briefings and safety-related training sessions, companies could involve leaderboards to encourage healthy competition, with teams earning badges as they complete each module.
Google was seeking a way to encourage travel expense compliance.
The solution? It gamified the process by allowing employees who didn’t spend their full travel allowances to choose what would happen to the remaining money.
This strategy uses two gamification elements: a challenge, and a reward.
With these small incentives, travel policy compliance reached 100% within six months.
Set up team booking guidelines, spending limits and contact information with this simple online tool.
Humans are hardwired to enjoy games, a pastime that spans millennia. It’s an enduring trend – the oldest gaming pieces date back at least 5,000 years, and in 2025 alone, the number of mobile gaming app downloads worldwide is projected to reach 155 billion.
Inspired by video games, gamification impacts the same reward centres in the brain, boosting feel-good endorphins and dopamine when new achievements are unlocked. Gamification addresses the human need for autonomy and feedback, incorporating social elements and healthy competition. It also follows the Prospect Theory from behavioural economics, which shows that positive reinforcement in the form of small incentives inspires people to make more effort where they otherwise wouldn’t.
Through progressing to the next level, unlocking new content, or earning rewards points, business travellers are more engaged and motivated to meet their goals. In short, gamification in travel planning makes following rules more fun.
Gamification in business travel uses four key elements derived from game design. If you’ve ever played a video game, you’ll probably recognise these core mechanics:
By combining these elements with clear goals and rewards, business travellers have the motivation needed to engage with travel planning.
According to a survey of European business travellers, over half (54%) stated that gamification would make their company’s business travel programme more appealing. And beyond engagement, the gamification of travel planning also improves compliance.
A common challenge that many companies face is motivating employees to comply with travel policies. Non-compliance is not only inefficient, but it also inflates company-wide travel costs while impacting future decisions. When expenses are consistently over budget due to a lack of compliance, businesses must make tough decisions, even cancelling upcoming trips.
By introducing gamification into the process, companies introduce intrinsic motivation to follow these policies.
Behavioural aspects to track and gamify could include things like:
Employees are more likely to change their behaviour when there’s a reward attached, either through competition and social cues, like leaderboards, or prizes for compliance, like points-based rewards.
This gives positive reinforcement for travel activities, making the whole process more interesting, fun, and fulfilling.
To get started with using these gamification principles in your own travel programme, follow these steps.
Are you purely focused on improving policy compliance, or looking for ways to reduce company travel costs? Do you need to improve engagement with upcoming training sessions? The first step should be to clarify desired outcomes with smart, objective goal setting. Make sure that goals are aligned with quantifiable targets to make them attainable for your employees.
Next, select the appropriate game mechanics. For example, imagine that your goal is to get more employees to give business hotels a star rating on company social networks. You could award badges to highly engaged employees, deeming them business travel experts.
If your goal is to keep costs within budget, provide points-based rewards for employees who stick to their travel allowance. To foster healthy competition, use leaderboards to reward teams that follow travel booking protocols. The best approach will depend on your goals, team size, and company needs.
Collect data throughout the implementation of a new gamification system. Are employees engaging with the game? Is this translating into increased compliance? Through continual feedback and employee input, adjust your gamification programme as needed.
Gaming provides autonomy and a sense of achievement. Heighten this with meaningful, personalised incentives tailored to your audience. Giving a choice of rewards is useful, such as Google’s approach to travel expense management that puts employees in control of their unused funds.
Once you’ve put systems in place, spread the word and build excitement amongst team members. Communicate the game’s rules and rewards with a special announcement delivered at a company launch event, team meeting, or social media post, following up with email to put it in writing. Highlight the most important benefits this will hold for employees, along with potential rewards and recognition they could earn.
To generate positive user experiences and improve engagement, here are a few tips to consider.
1. Keep games simple with minimal rules, like quizzes, wheel spins and scratch cards. Complex systems with too many gaming elements at once will cause frustration rather than engagement.
2. While you can reward users for achieving certain targets, provide rewards simply for engaging. For example, implement streaks or badges for daily logins to an approved travel platform.
3. When using leaderboards, consider team-based comparisons rather than individual ones to engage a wider range of employees.
4. Make targets straightforward and achievable, such as booking flights within a certain window or booking travel using approved management solutions.
5. Integrate your gamified elements with pre-existing processes and approved booking tools like Tripeden.com for Business.
6. Don’t rely solely on extrinsic rewards, which can cut into your company budget and frustrate users who don’t ‘win’ the game. Instead, blend prizes with intrinsic rewards like unlocking new levels of the game.
7. Update your challenges according to employee behaviour, patterns, and industry trends to keep them fresh and engaging.
There’s a multitude of factors to consider when planning business travel, from budget to location to visa restrictions. Using SME travel management tools like Tripeden.com for Business keeps these logistics organised and streamlines the process, at no extra cost.
Our all-in-one platform is a natural fit for business travel gamification. Features like a traveller safety map show the itinerary of each employee in real-time making it easier to stay up to date about business trips and track compliance at every step. And with a central, user-friendly dashboard, business travellers can take control over their own bookings to follow company policies and earn rewards.
When today’s business travellers have more outlets than ever for booking flights and hotels, adherence to company travel policy falls – and costs inflate accordingly. Modern business travel calls for modern, tech-driven solutions. Utilising the different types of gamification mechanics enables companies to reengage with their travelling employees. This starts with taking a cue from gamification in tourism, such as airline and hotel loyalty programmes which allow members to advance through various rewards levels by earning points.
Through a blend of these points-driven rewards schemes and friendly inter-office competitions, employees receive recognition alongside more tangible business travel incentives, from cash bonuses to company trips. Gamification turns the travel booking process into a mission, with employees completing challenges – like booking at preferred hotels or submitting expense reports within 48 hours – along the way. These strategies offer small and medium sized businesses a budget-friendly way to control travel spend. And the result is improved policy compliance, making it a win at every level.
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