More than half of every dollar moving through Instinct is travel money. The founder said so directly. Most fintech founders are racing toward subscriptions and SaaS payments. Instinct found a different angle, and the numbers back it up.
Why This Matters Right Now
Corporate travel is back in a big way. According to the Global Business Travel Association, business travel spending hit $1.4 trillion globally in 2024 and is expected to keep climbing through 2026. That’s not a blip. That’s a full structural recovery.
At the same time, most expense management tools were built for a world where receipts were paper and approvals took days. Instinct launched as a smarter alternative, targeting founders and small business operators who move fast and hate friction.
When the founder revealed that over 50 percent of all transactions on the platform are travel-related, that wasn’t a small data point. It was a signal about where business spending actually concentrates. Flights, hotels, car rentals, client dinners, conference fees. These aren’t one-off purchases. They’re recurring, high-dollar, and almost always painful to track.
According to American Express, the average company loses 1.4 percent of its total travel spend to inefficiencies in expense reporting every year. For a company spending $500,000 on travel annually, that’s $7,000 gone before anyone even files a report. That’s real money, and most small businesses just accept it as the cost of doing business.
What Instinct Actually Found
Here’s the contrarian read that most people will miss.
Instinct didn’t build a travel product. They built a financial platform for small businesses and startups. The fact that more than half of their transaction volume turned out to be travel-related is a discovery, not a design decision. And that discovery tells you everything about where founders and operators actually spend.
The fintech world spent the last five years obsessing over recurring revenue models, subscription businesses, and digital goods. Meanwhile, the people actually running companies were booking flights to close deals, putting hotels on corporate cards, and struggling to reconcile expenses the next morning before a pitch meeting.
According to Statista, the global corporate travel management software market was valued at roughly $10.3 billion in 2023. It’s projected to nearly double by 2030. That market is not being served by the big legacy players who built software for Fortune 500 procurement teams. It’s wide open for a faster, leaner product built for people who move.
I’ve watched multiple fintech startups try to get traction by going after the broadest possible definition of “business spending.” The ones that win tend to find out where their users actually bleed and then double down on solving that specific pain. Instinct now knows exactly where their users bleed. Travel is it.
This also matters for operators thinking about building a business in the expense or financial tools space. If you’re going to serve startups and growing companies, you’re probably serving their travel spend whether you plan to or not. You might as well plan for it.
If your business involves managing vendor agreements for travel bookings or client contracts tied to trip planning, a tool like signNow makes it easy to get signatures done fast without chasing anyone down over email. When deals move at travel speed, paperwork should too.
What This Means for You
If you run a small business or a startup, look at your own transaction history for the last 90 days. I’d bet travel is at or near the top. Flights, hotels, Uber, meals with clients. It adds up faster than most founders want to admit.
Here’s what I’d do with this information.
First, stop treating travel as a miscellaneous expense. Create a dedicated budget line for it and review it monthly. According to the GBTA, companies that actively manage their travel policies spend 22 percent less on travel than companies that don’t. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a material difference.
Second, if you’re evaluating expense management tools, ask directly how they handle travel transactions. Do they auto-categorize airline and hotel charges? Do they integrate with booking platforms? Do they flag out-of-policy spending before it hits the card? Instinct’s own data tells you this is the use case that matters most for companies at their stage.
Third, if this is a business you want to build or a market you want to enter, pay attention to what Instinct just signaled. The travel vertical inside corporate fintech is not saturated. It’s underserved. There’s room for tools that focus entirely on making travel spending visible, trackable, and defensible during audits.
And if you’re thinking about formalizing your business structure to take advantage of business expense deductions and travel write-offs, Inc Authority offers free LLC filing to get you set up properly. A real entity changes how you track and deduct everything, including travel.
The operators who treat travel as just another expense category will keep overpaying. The ones who manage it like the significant budget line it is will find margin in a place most of their competitors ignore.
The Bottom Line
Over 50 percent of Instinct’s transactions are travel. That’s not a quirk of the user base. That’s a mirror held up to how real businesses actually operate. Smart operators will look at that data and see opportunity. Everyone else will keep filing expense reports the same way they did five years ago and wonder why cash flow feels tight every quarter.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Instinct and why does the travel transaction data matter?
Instinct is a financial platform built for startups and small businesses. When the founder revealed that over 50 percent of platform transactions are travel-related, it confirmed what many operators already feel but rarely quantify: travel is one of the biggest and least managed spending categories in growing companies.
How can small businesses better manage travel spending?
Start with a dedicated budget line for travel and review it monthly. Companies with active travel policies spend roughly 22 percent less than those without one, according to the Global Business Travel Association. Use expense tools that auto-categorize travel charges and flag out-of-policy spending before it hits your card.
Is the corporate travel market a good space for fintech startups?
According to Statista, the corporate travel management software market is projected to nearly double from $10.3 billion in 2023 by 2030. Legacy tools were built for large enterprises. The small business and startup segment is still underserved, and Instinct’s transaction data shows demand is real and concentrated.
Why do founders end up spending so much on travel without realizing it?
Travel costs are distributed across multiple vendors: airlines, hotels, rideshares, meals, and conference fees. Because no single charge is enormous, founders often underestimate the total. According to American Express, the average company loses 1.4 percent of annual travel spend to expense tracking inefficiencies alone.
Should I structure my business as an LLC before tracking travel expenses?
Yes, a formal business entity changes how you deduct and track travel costs. With an LLC, business travel becomes a legitimate deductible expense, which reduces your taxable income. Setting up the entity first means every trip from that point forward is documented under the right structure.
