When thinking of “business travel,” people usually think of multiple airports, flights, rental cars, and taxi rides. However, post-pandemic, there is a clear trend going on within the business travel concept, more specifically with train bookings, and it is not slowing down.
For ages, most business travel has consisted of the same ingredients – airports, flights, car journeys and a tedious long series of waiting in lines and possible queues on the roads as well. All of the above traveling methods also come with their fair share of carbon emissions. As companies are making efforts to lower their carbon footprint, the way we travel is shifting, and thus, how we do business.
Fast forward through a pandemic where we had lockdowns, closed borders, most air travel at a standstill and we see a rennaissance in business travel by train.
Train bookings – reshaping business travel
Rail travel is moving from an emerging trend to a standard option in corporate travel. A 2025 BCD Travel survey found that two-thirds of business travelers would choose rail over air when cost and journey time are comparable, rising to three-quarters among European respondents. Sustainability is also increasingly influencing corporate travel policies: many companies now encourage employees to take the train instead of flying on suitable short-distance routes, while rail-first policies for short- and medium-haul journeys are becoming more common across the EU.
European policymakers are also promoting rail as an alternative to short-haul aviation. In 2026, the European Commission proposed new rules to simplify cross-border train bookings and make sustainable travel easier, as part of a wider effort to make rail a more attractive alternative to short flights.
France is a leading example of this. In April 2022, they took a bold step to ban some short-haul domestic flights in favor for their high-speed train, TGV. However, other countries’ business travelers are following suit. In the USA (United States), the trend is clearly visible with Amtrak ridership rising steadily for three consecutive years and reaching a record 34.5 million trips in 2025, up 5.1% from 2024 on top of their returning train travel customers. In Germany, rail has become the leading mode of transport for domestic business travel. According to the VDR Business Travel Analysis 2026, trains accounted for 52% of travel on domestic routes in 2025, compared with just 13% for domestic flights.
Besides the obvious environmental gains of train travel, several other factors highlight the benefit such as – saving money since the tickets are usually lower, going straight to the destination and city center, the possibility of getting work done on the train, avoiding the risk of losing luggage and lowering stress.
However, rail travel is not risk-free. Security managers must account for evolving threats and disruptions throughout the journey, including cyber incidents, infrastructure failures and extreme weather. As usual, the threats vary by the traveler’s geographic location. With new threats and old types of threats in new environments – it’s a matter of how you can prevent them from happening and what you do when something actually happens.
This is where technology is paramount in keeping employees safe in modern untested, and unpredictable scenarios. Some examples of this are the train bombings happening all over Europe in the past 10-20 years. Another incident is train disruptions due to bad weather in Sweden, where passengers were left stranded for hours in the winter cold.
Having systems that integrate and being able to manage travel risk management , no matter what type of transportation, is going to be crucial to be able to offer the same level of security and trust to employees by air, car, or train. As safety policies and protocols should be updated on the new ways of business travel, so should also the technology responsible for handling employee safety.
To make it easier for companies to accommodate shifts in travel patterns and methods, Safeture offers support for train booking. Bookings are automatically integrated into the Safeture platform like any other kind of booking. This enables employees to view train bookings and the managers to support employees when needed. The integration is seamless, with automated pre-trip emails that include valuable security information and other features. With the Safeture platform, you are set and ready to facilitate the increasing number of train bookings.