The Global Business Travel Association’s 2026 Business Travel Index projects education business-travel spending to grow at a 6.3% compound annual growth rate through 2030, putting it among the fastest-growing sectors covered by the forecast.
For colleges and universities, that travel may include study-abroad programs, athletics, recruiting, conferences, faculty research, professional development, and administrative meetings. Managing those expenses through personal cards and after-the-fact reimbursement can create significant administrative work.
A corporate travel card gives institutions another option by putting approved travel spending on a payment method managed by the institutions rather than requiring employees to pay first and seek reimbursement later.
A corporate T&E card is a payment card issued or administered by an organization specifically for approved business travel. Depending on the program, cards may be assigned to individual employees, particular departments, or institutional travel programs. Typical expenses may include:
Finance teams can establish spending rules, collect transaction data, and reconcile charges within institutional systems instead of relying entirely on employee-submitted expense records.
One of the strongest advantages of an institutional travel-card program is that policy controls can be applied when spending occurs rather than only after a reimbursement request is submitted.
Institutions may be able to configure controls based on:
Automated alerts can also help finance teams identify transactions that fall outside expected patterns.
These controls can reinforce those policies at the payment level. Instead of discovering an out-of-policy transaction only after an employee submits a reimbursement request, institutions can restrict certain types of purchases before they happen.
Higher education travel involves a wide range of use cases, which makes flexibility particularly important.
Faculty and staff overseeing international programs may need reliable access to funds for transportation, accommodations, meals, emergency purchases, and program expenses. Institutional cards can reduce dependence on cash advances or personal funds while giving finance teams greater visibility into spending during the program.
Athletics departments may manage frequent team travel involving transportation, lodging, meals, and other group expenses. Card controls can help establish spending limits while reducing the need for coaches, administrators, or staff members to use personal cards for large institutional expenses.
Faculty and staff may travel regularly for conferences, professional development, academic meetings, or research. A controlled payment method can simplify airfare, hotel, and ground-transportation purchases while helping institutions maintain more consistent records across departments.
Federal research grants require strict adherence to travel policies under OMB Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200). T&E cards integrated with AP systems can prevent unallowable costs from being charged to federal grants, protecting the institution from audit penalties.
The traditional reimbursement model requires employees to pay with their personal funds, retain receipts, complete forms, wait for approvals, and then wait again for repayment.
Moving more travel spending onto T&E cards can reduce that burden, requiring:
Reimbursement may still make sense for occasional or exceptional expenses. However, institutions with significant travel volume benefit from shifting predictable expenses onto controlled payment methods.
A corporate travel card won’t eliminate paperwork, but it does provide real efficiency gains when payment data flows automatically into the institution’s broader financial systems.
Transaction feeds can populate expense records automatically, while digital tools can support receipt matching, coding, approval routing, and reconciliation. Integration with ERP, AP, and expense-management systems can also reduce duplicate entry and give finance teams more timely data.
You can implement T&E cards along with ghost cards or virtual cards with Corpay, a fully-integrated AP automation platform. With E&I’s competitively solicited Corpay contract, you can benefit from a full procure-to-pay solution with an exclusive rebate structure that can serve as a source of net new unrestricted revenue for academic institutions.
Explore E&I’s Corpay contract today. See how you can automate manual processes, streamline vendor payments, enable employee purchases, and reduce fraud in one easy-to-use platform.