Launching an international travel product used to come down largely to distribution – sign up enough partners, get your services live in enough markets and the assumption was that scale would follow naturally. The harder question now is what’s happening underneath that distribution layer, because as travel platforms connect bigger international networks, their value increasingly depends on whether they can understand what is happening locally rather than simply making the same service available everywhere, writes Andrew Harrison-Chinn, CMO at Dragonpass
HSBC found that 77% of internationally minded businesses plan to enter new overseas markets within two years, and global corporate travel spend is forecast to hit $1.71 trillion in 2026 even as trip volumes rise by just 1.3%. More activity is flowing through a travel ecosystem that keeps getting more complex, putting greater pressure on the infrastructure and information sitting behind the services travellers actually see.
Our own customer data gives a good sense of how differently individual markets can move. Between January and August 2026, Dragonpass usage in Buenos Aires was up 41.4% year on year, compared with 35.3% in Madrid and 18.8% in Toronto. You can’t treat behaviour in one destination as a template for another when activity is shifting at such different speeds within the same international network.
For a global platform, the challenge is therefore less about reproducing an identical offering in every country and more about recognising where needs are changing and what is useful in each market. Global reach becomes far more valuable when it is informed by local insight, because the same benefit can carry different relevance depending on where somebody is travelling, how that market operates and what the journey actually looks like.
Data has an important role here, but collecting more of it is not the end goal. The useful part is being able to spot patterns in how services are being used and feed those signals back into decisions about what should be prioritised. Historical reporting can tell a business what customers did last quarter, while stronger analysis can help it identify emerging changes earlier and adjust the experience around them rather than waiting until those changes are obvious.
Localisation also goes much deeper than changing the language or currency on a screen. Different markets bring their own operational requirements, customer expectations and patterns of travel. A genuinely international platform needs to preserve those differences while still building a connected picture of how people are moving and what they value. The objective should not be to flatten local behaviour into one global average, but to make international scale more useful because the information behind it retains enough context to mean something.
Travel makes that particularly important because the customer experience often cuts across multiple providers and services. The traveller may see one relatively simple journey, while the experience itself depends on several organisations working around the same itinerary. Better information can help make the benefits surrounding that journey more relevant, rather than leaving travellers to navigate a long menu of perks that may or may not be useful to them.
The gap becomes clearer when you put the traveller experience next to the support employees actually receive. Dragonpass research found that 27% of UK business travellers said travel stress had knocked them below their usual performance, while only 8% of corporate travel policies included lounge or Fast Track access. There is a disconnect between what some travellers experience on the road and the practical support available to them, which is where smarter use of service and behavioural data can begin to have a meaningful effect.
Dragonpass for Business Travel reflects that approach by bringing different airport and travel services into one proposition while allowing support to be shaped around the requirements of the journey. The principle is not that every traveller should receive the same set of benefits. It is that a platform should have enough visibility to make those benefits relevant and usable when they are needed.
The same thinking increasingly applies to loyalty. Dragonpass research found that 50% of UK adults think most loyalty schemes feel outdated, while 69% say brands that cut down stress and hassle are the ones that win long-term loyalty. Loyalty is moving away from the assumption that a longer list of benefits automatically creates more value. The stronger proposition is one where benefits fit naturally into what a customer is already trying to do and make the experience noticeably easier.
The next chapter of global travel tech will therefore be defined as much by what’s happening beneath the surface as by the size of the network itself. Scale still counts, but it counts for far more when the platform behind it can interpret international behaviour without losing the local differences that make the data useful in the first place. The smartest global systems will be the ones capable of connecting those two things, creating an experience that works consistently across borders without assuming every market or traveller behaves in the same way.
