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For most of the past decade, corporate travel policies changed little from one year to the next. That has begun to shift, and not for the reason executives most often cite. Companies rarely announce that they are trimming travel budgets outright, since doing so signals weakness to clients and staff alike. Instead, a growing number are rewriting the rules governing how trips are approved and reimbursed, with the result that fewer trips clear the threshold in the first place. A survey of mid-sized firms conducted this spring found that the most common revision was not a lower daily allowance but a requirement that any trip lasting more than two nights be justified in writing against a measurable objective. Finance officers who responded described the added paperwork as an unintended filter rather than a deliberate one: the volume of requests fell by roughly a fifth in the first quarter after the change, though no request was formally denied. One officer at a logistics consultancy noted that the firm had expected pushback from its sales division and received almost none, a reaction she attributed less to acceptance than to a preference among younger staff for meeting clients remotely. Not every firm has seen the same outcome. At organizations where reimbursement is processed weeks after a trip concludes, employees have simply continued to travel and absorbed the delay, while at those that moved to prepaid corporate accounts, travel volume held steady but the mix shifted noticeably toward shorter regional trips. Analysts caution that comparing figures across firms remains difficult, since few companies define a business trip the same way, and some now exclude same-day travel from their reporting altogether.