Families Join Work Trips While the Risk Stays Hidden

Perk, the business travel platform formerly called TravelPerk, found that 73% of C-suite travelers have brought a loved one on a work trip, compared with 55% of other employees. The figures came out on August 13, 2025, from OnePoll surveys in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Spain.

The evenings together are real. So is the second bill: a companion airfare, an extra hotel bed, and an insurance file that still names only the employee.

Perk’s Survey Puts Executives Ahead of Staff

OnePoll interviewed 600 C-suite leaders who travel for work from March 13 to 27, 2025, then a broader group of 4,000 business travelers from March 12 to 19, 2025. Partners lead both groups. Pets are the one category where non-executives run ahead.

WHO COMES ALONG ON A WORK TRIP

People can bring more than one kind of companion, so those rows are not meant to add to 100%. Among CEOs, pet travel rises to 9%. Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo, Perk’s president and COO, said work travel can be lonely, and that a loved one on the trip keeps a connection that a hotel room does not.

Natasha Colkmire did not want to leave her newborn with a nanny. A relative came along so the baby could be nursed between meetings, and the evenings were shared. Later she took her grandmother to Houston, a friend to St. Paul, and her mother to Washington, D.C. “Each person loved getting the free trip,” she said. She now runs a travel website.

That “free” part is the point the survey does not price. The company already bought the expensive seat. The companion is riding the itinerary the employer paid to create.

The IRS Still Prices a Solo Room

U.S. tax rules never caught up with the family in the next seat. Publication 463 from the Internal Revenue Service says you generally cannot deduct a companion’s travel costs unless three conditions are all met.

THE THREE TESTS FOR A COMPANION DEDUCTION

• Employee status: The person who comes along must work for the business, on the payroll, not as a helper for the week.
• A real business reason: Their presence on that trip has to serve the work, not the marriage or the childcare gap.
• Ordinary travel costs: The expenses would have to be deductible if that person had traveled alone.

Typing notes and sitting in on dinners do not clear the bar. The IRS walks through a drive to Chicago that a lot of couples would recognize.

You drive to Chicago on business and take your spouse with you. Your spouse isn’t your employee. Your spouse occasionally types notes, performs similar services, and accompanies you to luncheons and dinners. The performance of these services doesn’t establish that your spouse’s presence on the trip is necessary to the conduct of your business. Your spouse’s expenses aren’t deductible. You pay $199 a day for a double room. A single room costs $149 a day. You can deduct the total cost of driving your car to and from Chicago, but only $149 a day for your hotel room. If both you and your spouse use public transportation, you can only deduct your fare.

Internal Revenue Service, Publication 463 (2025)

The extra $50 on the room is personal. The second plane ticket is personal. Drive, and the car cost stays deductible because the passenger did not make the trip more expensive. Fly, and the companion’s fare is on the household.

Who Pays for the Extra Seat?

Bridgette Borst Ombres, a public relations consultant, used a tech conference at Disney World in Orlando as a short family trip. The conference ran two days. While she worked, her husband took their then-2-year-old daughter to visit his father nearby, and the three of them met for dinner. After the sessions ended, they stayed on at Walt Disney World. Her company covered the hotel for the first two nights and her plane ticket. She paid the extra nights, the park days, and her husband’s ticket.

Colkmire joined her husband on a work trip to Vienna and said their cost was cut in half, which is how a city they had not seen became affordable. Gabe Richman, CEO of the Seattle biotech firm Omic, has mixed work with family time in San Diego and Frankfurt. He tells staff to meet the business goal first, split personal costs cleanly, and tell the company the plan. “Business takes me to places we’d never vacation to otherwise,” he said. “Why waste the opportunity?”

Deepak Shukla, CEO of the London marketing firm Pearl Lemon, has turned three-day work trips into week-long stays with his wife in New York, Lisbon, Dubai, and Tokyo. He does not hide it from his team. Big companies, he said, still treat family on the itinerary as a policy gray zone.

If the work’s done and costs aren’t creeping into the company card, it’s nobody’s business.

Deepak Shukla, CEO, Pearl Lemon

The sticking points he named are expense claims, insurance, and leisure days that blur into workdays, which get messy for tax and liability. Some firms, he said, quietly allow the mix and then expect receipts and activities to be split with care. Ombres did not keep her plans a secret, and she did not advertise them to coworkers either, in part because she worried it might look unprofessional.

The sales pitch around blended trips is blunter than those private calculations. Let the company cover the flight and the work nights, then stay two to four extra days. That is how a required meeting becomes a cheap holiday, as long as nobody puts the companion ticket on the corporate card.

The Weekend Room the Company Did Not Book

Perk’s C-suite sample shows the add-on in the diary, not only in the next seat: 21% now extend a work trip for leisure, and 16% sleep at a colleague’s, friend’s, or family member’s home. Among those leaders, 61% travel for work at least once a month. Only 25% of CEOs said they struggle with work-life balance on the road. Nearly half, 49%, set time limits while they travel. Another 44% pick quieter trains or similar work-friendly transport, and 37% pay for in-flight WiFi.

Hotels feel the extra night even when the employer does not pay it. Allied Market Research valued that blend of business and leisure travel, often called bleisure, at $315 billion in 2022 and projected $731 billion globally by 2032. The traveler who stays through Sunday is a weekend room the corporate rate never had to justify.

HOW THE BILL USUALLY SPLITS

• The company: Round-trip airfare for the employee, hotel nights tied to the meetings, and ground transport for the work days.
• The employee: The companion’s ticket, the extra hotel nights, meals and tickets after the last session, and any room upgrade past the single-occupancy rate.
• The tax file: Lodging capped at the solo room rate, with the second fare left out unless the companion is an employee with a real business reason to be there.

Ewan Lim, GSK’s senior manager of travel and meetings operations for Asia Pacific and emerging markets, described a co-funding version of the same split. The company covers the airfare. Anything outside the work scope, the traveler covers. That is the clean version of what Shukla called a gray zone: the meeting still launches the trip, and the holiday no longer pretends to be an expense claim.

Coverage Often Stops When Meetings End

Frank Harrison, regional security director for the Americas at World Travel Protection, said bringing loved ones is common and generally accepted. Acceptance is not the same as a named insured. Corporate medical cover, evacuation, and emergency assistance are written for the employee. A partner, a child, or a parent on the same reservation usually needs a separate policy.

Jorge Mesa, senior director of travel risk management at BCD Travel, said the risk picture changes once people leave the official itinerary. The job is no longer the trip on the booking tool. It is the whole movement, including the personal extension. Neil Hammond, a partner at Goldspring Consulting, put the family question in operational terms: if an evacuation or a hospital stay hits, are those extra people documented and provisioned, or is the company improvising in a crisis?

WHAT WE KNOW

• The named traveler: Company insurance and emergency help are built around the employee on the work booking.
• The lodging cap: The IRS example prices a double room at the single-room rate of $149, not the $199 actually paid.
• The split: Ombres, Richman, Shukla, and Lim all describe the same line: work costs on the company, leisure costs on the household.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Leisure-day duty of care: Whether a given employer will track, assist, or pay once the last meeting ends.
• A Saturday injury: Whether workers’ compensation still applies if the harm lands on a personal day in the same city.
• Companion evacuation: Whether a spouse or child is on the crisis list before something goes wrong.

Ombres is in favor of letting family join, as long as the work is done. She sets that expectation in advance and does not want firms micromanaging personal hours after it is met. Harrison’s “generally accepted” sits next to her instinct not to broadcast the plan. The practice is widespread. The paperwork still assumes one adult with a laptop.

Travel Managers Tightened Policy as Spend Rose

The people who write the rulebooks are not matching the 73% figure with looser language. GBTA, working with Altour, surveyed 168 travel managers in the United States and Canada and found that 32% of travel managers said their policy is stricter than it was three years earlier. Only 5% said it had become more lenient. More than half of those policies, 51%, run longer than 10 pages. Booking outside required channels and out-of-policy hotel stays are the main compliance headaches, which is exactly where a spouse’s extra night or a self-booked weekend hotel tends to live.

GBTA says it represents the $1.71 trillion global business travel and meetings industry. In a poll of 604 travel professionals run from August 27 to September 9, 2026, 63% were optimistic about the next 12 months. Among buyers, 56% expected travel spend at their organization to rise in 2026 versus 2025, and 45% expected more trips. Rising costs were the top planning pressure, named by 69% of buyers. Suzanne Neufang, GBTA’s CEO, said organizations are getting more deliberate about where and why they travel.

That discipline and the family itinerary are now on the same reservation. Perk’s C-suite travelers still want a quiet room first (43%), then a decent breakfast (40%) and healthier food (34%). After they land, 21% shower before they do anything else, and 17% check in with family. Only 3% go straight to the office, versus 7% of entry-level staff. Taunay-Bucalo packs workout gear and a white noise machine so he can work at full tilt. He has also said that performing at his peak can mean seeing his child at the end of a work day.

The survey made the family seat look like a wellness habit. The tax page, the insurance certificate, and the 32% of managers tightening policy treat it as a cost-allocation problem that never got a clean line. Lim’s version is the one that will survive a receipt check: the company buys the flight that the meeting requires, and everyone else on the trip pays their own way.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of survey results, tax publications, and corporate travel research. It is for information only and is not tax, legal, insurance, or employment advice. It does not tell any reader whether a companion’s ticket, an extra hotel night, or a blended itinerary is deductible, insurable, or allowed under a given employer’s policy. Speak with a qualified tax professional, employment lawyer, or licensed insurance broker, and with your company’s travel or HR team, before booking family onto a work trip or filing related expenses. Figures and policy statuses reflect the Perk, IRS, and GBTA sources cited and can change with new surveys, tax years, and employer rules.