2026 may be a turbulent year for global businesses. Here are the mobility and business travel risks to expect in the year ahead – and how to protect yourself against them
9 January 2026 | By Alex Schulte
For multinational companies, 2025 was surely one of the most turbulent years in recent history.
Trump’s tariffs ricocheted across global supply chains. AI wobbles sent stock indices tumbling before they skyrocketed back in relief rallies. All the while, bloody wars continued to wreak misery and leave various regions in turmoil.
But talent mobility professionals may remember 2025 for its seismic changes in border policy. Major economies like the US, Britain and France made migration harder and more expensive, while stepping up enforcement on short-term business travellers.
Looking out at the new year, there’s little sign of respite. Many of 2025’s headline policy changes will only start to bite over the next 12 months, and will no doubt be followed by new, similarly disruptive reforms. Meanwhile, long-bubbling trends could easily boil over into compliance crises.
A slew of risk factors could leave your team’s best-laid plans in the rubble. That’s why it’s so important to know what might lie ahead – and plan for it now.
Here are the most urgent dangers the year might throw at you – and how to mitigate them.
1. Automated enforcement could catch your travellers out
Last year, the digital border moved from a vision to an emerging reality.
This year, automated border enforcement will begin in earnest.
What changed in 2025
In 2025, the UK and EU began replacing discretionary border control with digital enforcement.
The UK introduced mandatory Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) for visa-free travellers, creating a central record of entries and exits before travel even begins. The EU followed with the first phase of the Entry/Exit System (EES), digitally recording every short stay using biometric data.
For the first time, travel history began to be captured automatically rather than inferred.
What’s new in 2026
In 2026, these systems move into full operational use.
EES is expected to be fully live across the EU by April, automatically calculating time spent in the Schengen Area against stay limits. Later in the year, ETIAS will introduce mandatory pre-travel screening for visa-free travellers, assessing travel history before permission to travel is granted.
By the end of 2026, entry to the UK and EU will depend on a verified digital identity and a complete, searchable travel record.
How this could knock you off course
This is where routine travel starts to become a danger.
These new systems create a centralised, searchable travel history that makes repeat short stays and extended presence far more visible to border authorities.
A high-frequency traveller is refused entry because their cumulative days tip over the limit. A project lead is delayed after extending a stay by a single day. A sales team rotating short visits triggers scrutiny because one individual’s travel pattern looks continuous rather than occasional.
Under EES, days are counted precisely and deviations flagged automatically. Where border officers once exercised discretion, decisions are now binary. Travel can be delayed, refused or blocked entirely before departure, often with knock-on scrutiny of the employer’s wider travel controls.
How to mitigate the risks
Control needs to happen before travel, not at the border.
Track cumulative days across rolling periods, identify high-frequency travellers early, and tighten controls around business visitor activity. Align booking, approval and expense data so changes are visible in real time.
In an automated border environment, prevention is the only effective response.
In 2026, the cost of getting this wrong is measured in refused entry, lost time and exposed programmes. The only viable control point is before travel begins.
Digital border risk prevention checklist
Before travel
✅ Confirm ETA or ETIAS approval
✅ Check cumulative days in the UK and Schengen Area
✅ Flag travellers nearing stay limits
Planning and booking
✅ Identify high-frequency travellers
✅ Confirm activities fit business visitor rules
✅ Review extensions or changes immediately
Traveller readiness
✅ Explain automated border checks
✅ Set expectations for refusal or delay
✅ Provide escalation contacts
Ongoing oversight
✅ Review travel patterns regularly
✅ Track refusals and near misses
2. Policy flux strikes again
Policy volatility is no longer background noise. In 2025, it hit mobility teams directly, with effects that will keep on unfolding in 2026
What changed in 2025
In September, President Trump dropped a bombshell on mobility teams by raising the fee for new H-1B visa applications to $100,000. Suddenly, the load-bearing visa route for the US tech industry was placed out of reach for all but the most senior talent.
US officials also tightened interpretation of ESTA and B-1 business travel rules, with border officers probing repeat short trips and activity that resembles hands-on engagement.
In the UK, the Government raised visa salary thresholds, increased administrative costs and signalled much longer routes to settlement.
France and other EU states also stepped up checks on short-stay and posted worker travel, reducing tolerance for loosely defined business visits.
These reforms did not land softly. Roles previously considered compliant failed eligibility tests. Budgets were upended by cost increases. And at the drop of a hat, mobility teams found themselves forced into reactive replanning.
What’s new in 2026
In 2026, enforcement begins to catch up with policy.
In the US, tighter scrutiny of ESTA and B-1 travel is expected to continue, especially for high-frequency trips that risk being treated as unauthorised work. The new H-1B fee regime has already disrupted employer planning and will influence filings through at least the next cap cycle.
In the UK, proposals from the 2025 White Paper are progressing to implementation. Companies are losing their sponsor licenses at record rates as the Government cracks down on infractions.
Across the EU, national authorities will increasingly enforce business travel and temporary work rules in parallel with digital border systems.
Across the board, the common factors are higher costs, less tolerance for accidental violations, and fewer safe assumptions.
We also cannot rule out further policy shocks from left field that make conditions even worse.
How this could knock you off course
Policy shifts disrupt settled assumptions.
A role scoped under last year’s salary threshold may no longer qualify in the UK.
A US H-1B hiring plan that was ready to go a year ago is probably now prohibitively expensive.
A project blueprint relying on creative use of short-term travel is suddenly riskier and harder to defend.
These problems often surface late in the process – at application, at the border or in audit – when commitments are already solid, and alternatives are limited.
How to mitigate the risks
Mobility teams should assume that change will happen and build defences against it.
✅ Revalidate eligibility, costs and timelines for all active and forthcoming cases under current policy, not historical precedent.
✅ For US hires, build alternative strategies beyond H-1B where possible. But remember that short-term travel is no longer a workaround in lieu of formal authorisation.
✅ Embed automated policy monitoring so that you’re never blindsided by new reforms and enforcement practices.
The regulatory ground is less stable than ever. Don’t let yourself get wrongfooted.
3. Asymmetric visa and ESTA refusals
Recently, we’ve noticed an uptick in businesses coming to us after their staff’s visas were refused for no apparent reason. Frequent travellers with no history of immigration offences would find their path to familiar routes suddenly blocked, with no explanation given.
We looked into the real data to make sense of why this might be happening.
We found that visa refusal rates are massively on the rise for some cohorts and along some travel corridors. But the risks are not evenly distributed.
In 2026, some employers will be far more exposed than others, often for reasons outside their control.
What changed in 2025
In the last few years, refusal rates for short-term visas and travel authorisations have remained elevated across several major regimes.
In Europe, Schengen short-stay visa refusals stayed well above pre-pandemic norms.
The US continued to tighten screening under ESTA and B-1, particularly for repeat travellers and applicants with complex travel histories. Though official data for 2025 has not yet been released, anecdotal evidence suggests that travellers have come under fiercer scrutiny since President Trump’s inauguration.
US non-immigrant visa applicants are now required to list all social media usernames they have used in the last five years. This indicates that an individual’s history of political speech may now be a significant criterion for entry to the US.
These trends have dovetailed with the growth in digital pre-clearance systems. Applications became increasingly assessed on data patterns rather than individual explanations. With discretion largely removed from the system, outright refusal became more likely.
The practical effect was simple. More applications failed, and failure increasingly depended on profile rather than intent.
What’s new in 2026
In 2026, refusal risk will increase yet further.
The US is proposing to expand the social media stipulation to the ESTA waiver system, requiring visa-free applicants to submit five years’ worth of social media history for pre-clearance. We may expect more travellers to be refused entry due to political content they posted long ago, and forgot about.
Across the Atlantic, with EES, ETIAS and ETA in force, authorities have cleaner travel histories, clearer overstay data and better insight into frequency of travel. Automated screening flags patterns that previously went unnoticed, including repeated short visits, extended stays and reliance on visitor routes.
As a result, refusals are more likely to occur before travel begins, particularly for travellers whose profiles sit closer to perceived risk thresholds.
How this could knock you off course
Refusals will not be evenly distributed across your workforce.
Employees most exposed include:
🚩 First-time travellers with no history of past compliance
🚩 Travellers from higher-refusal jurisdictions such as the Middle East or East Africa, where data continues to show materially higher refusal rates.
🚩 High-frequency ESTA or B-1 users, who may invite suspicion from US authorities that they are performing regular client-facing or delivery work.
🚩 Employees involved in client delivery and project roles face higher refusal risk, as authorities apply narrower interpretations of permitted business visitor activity.
🚩 Travellers with prior anomalies such as previous overstays, refusals, border questioning or inconsistent travel records.
🚩 Short-notice travellers who submit close to travel dates, with limited documentation or unclear purpose.
The impact is operational. A senior employee travels while their team member cannot. Projects lose continuity. Client relationships are strained when the “right” person cannot enter the country.
In some cases, refusal patterns raise internal questions about fairness, inclusion and access to opportunity.
Over time, uneven refusal rates can distort mobility planning and talent deployment in ways that are hard to unwind.
How to mitigate the risks
Don’t treat refusal risk as an exceptional occurrence; factor it into all plans and build redundancy.
Assess refusal likelihood by traveller profile, not just destination. Build buffers for higher-risk applicants, including longer lead times, stronger documentation and alternative staffing plans. Avoid single points of failure where one individual’s travel is mission-critical.
Where possible, diversify travel exposure across teams rather than relying on the same individuals repeatedly. Track refusals and near misses to identify patterns early.
4. Basic errors could create costly compliance mistakes
As borders and enforcement become more automated, small mistakes are more likely to trigger outsized consequences.
But two seemingly contradictory factors both raise the likelihood of such errors.
The first involves human errors committed over the course of manual workflows.
The second comes from improper use of AI.
What changed in 2025
In 2025, compliance failures increasingly stemmed from execution rather than intent.
Many mobility and travel departments still function manually. Teams will track movements on spreadsheets and email threads and assess current rules against familiar rules of thumb, rather than up-to-the-minute writ. Small oversights or outdated assumptions are inevitable.
But teams that have made small steps towards digital transformation aren’t safe either. For many, adopting AI means relying on free versions of general-purpose tools like ChatGPT to research visa rules and draft legal documents.
Yet generalist large language models are notorious for factual ‘hallucinations’, and their verdicts on visa protocol and current regulation shouldn’t be taken at face value.
It doesn’t matter if the mistake is made by an overworked human or a misfiring AI. It will lead to the same dead end.
What’s new in 2026
In 2026, those same errors are more likely to be detected and acted on.
Automated border systems, pre-travel authorisations and data-linked enforcement leave little room to correct inaccuracies after the fact.
As early-stage AI uptake booms, the outputs of consumer-facing tools are increasingly treated as gospel by time-pressured teams. But errors now travel faster through systems and reach the point of enforcement more often.
How this could knock you off course
Most failures follow predictable patterns.
Human error commonly appears as miscounted stays, outdated thresholds, misclassified activities or unapproved trip extensions. These issues often arise when decisions are made quickly or when responsibility is unclear.
Basic AI misuse introduces different risk pathways.
🚨 Teams rely on AI-generated summaries of visa rules without checking recency or local nuance.
🚨 Permitted activities are oversimplified.
🚨 Template documents reflect old policy.
🚨 Answers appear authoritative but do not account for enforcement reality.
And all the while, teams retain misplaced confidence in these tools’ infallibility.
These errors arise because general AI tools optimise for plausibility, not compliance. While useful for orientation, they aren’t built to inform compliance-critical decision making.
Individually, these mistakes look minor. In combination, they trigger refusals, questioning, delays or audits, often at the point where options are limited and business commitments are fixed.
How to mitigate the risks
Reduce reliance on judgment and unchecked automation.
Define clearly where general AI tools may be used and where specialist validation is required. Standardise high-risk decisions such as stay calculations, eligibility checks and activity classification so they are not handled ad hoc.
This is where purpose-built AI applications like Centuro Global’s Travel Compliance Assistant, designed specifically for mobility and travel compliance, add value. Our Assistant is trained on a vast proprietary dataset of global rules, jurisdiction-specific logic, and documented precedents, so every suggestion can withstand critical compliance checkpoints.
The most effective way to prevent costly mistakes in 2026 is to automate your fact-finding, but to be very selective in the tools you trust.
5. Employee travel patterns could land you in trouble
Employees are travelling and working in ways that legacy mobility and compliance frameworks were not built for. In 2026, those emerging behaviours will expose many organisations to immigration, tax and labour risk.
What changed in 2025
Ever since 2020, employee travel patterns have become ever less tied to formal assignments.
Global business travel continued to recover from its pandemic lows. Spending on business travel was projected to have risen from roughly $1.48 trillion in 2024 to $1.64 trillion in 2025. Clearly, predictions that mass remote working would remove the need for corporate travel were way wide of the mark.
But while the demand for travel has remained, the patterns underlying it are very different. Employees are taking more frequent trips with multi-country itineraries, and working remotely from locations that were not their home country or formal assignment destination in ‘bleisure’ travel modes.
At the same time, hybrid and remote work models solidified as standard arrangements rather than exceptions. Surveys in 2025 showed that tens of millions of workers were still operating in hybrid modes or incorporating remote flexibility into roles that had not previously done so.
These patterns matter, particularly from a tax perspective. Presence is the starting point for tax residency tests, payroll obligations and permanent establishment analysis.
In 2025, many organisations continued to treat short-term or informal travel as operationally convenient but fiscally low risk.
That assumption is now much harder to defend.
What’s new in 2026
In 2026, travel data and tax enforcement are converging.
Tax authorities increasingly use travel and border data to assess whether employees have triggered local tax or social security obligations. Repeated presence, even in short bursts, is easier to identify and harder to explain away. At the same time, immigration and tax authorities are sharing data more readily, reducing gaps between what is declared and what is observable.
Crucially, permanent establishment risk is no longer limited to senior executives signing contracts. Repeated in-country activity by sales, technical or project staff can now contribute to PE exposure where it supports revenue generation or core business operations.
How this could knock you off course
Tax risk rarely announces itself early.
An employee working remotely from another country for a few weeks at a time may quietly approach tax residency thresholds.
A sales lead travelling frequently to support local clients may be viewed as creating a dependent agent or fixed place of business.
A team rotating short visits can collectively establish a level of presence that authorities interpret as ongoing activity rather than occasional travel.
These risks often surface retrospectively. When they do, the consequences can include unexpected corporate tax liabilities, payroll withholding obligations, penalties and interest, as well as the cost of unwinding arrangements that were never formally approved.
What looked like flexible travel can become a material – and ongoing – financial exposure.
How to mitigate the risks
Treat travel patterns as tax signals, not just mobility logistics.
Map employee travel against tax residency, payroll and PE thresholds, particularly for high-frequency and client-facing roles. Ensure that changes in location, duration or activity trigger review not only by mobility teams but also by tax and payroll specialists.
Avoid relying on short-term travel as a substitute for proper structuring where activity is ongoing. Where employees support revenue-generating work in a market, assess PE risk proactively rather than after the fact.
In 2026, unmanaged travel is one of the easiest ways to create hidden tax exposure. Visibility and early intervention are far cheaper than remediation.
High-risk travel patterns to watch
☑ Repeated short stays that accumulate presence over time
☑ Remote work from foreign locations without tax assessment
☑ Frequent sales or client-facing travel into the same market
☑ Project or technical work delivered on-site across multiple visits
☑ Teams rotating travel to avoid formal assignment thresholds
☑ Travel patterns that support revenue generation locally
6. Geopolitical instability could create a duty of care crisis
Geopolitical risk is no longer confined to traditionally high-risk destinations.
In 2026, instability can escalate quickly, disrupting routine business travel and increasing employers’ legal and practical duty-of-care exposure.
What changed in 2025
In 2025, geopolitical disruption became more widespread and less predictable.
Ongoing conflicts and regional tensions continued to affect airspace, travel routes and border controls, with knock-on effects for international travel and supply chains. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, geopolitical conflict and state-based confrontation remain among the most severe short-term pressures.
Sanctions regimes also expanded and shifted during the year, sometimes with limited notice. This has affected travel legality, payments and employee mobility. The EU and US both issued multiple updates to sanctions frameworks in 2025, underscoring how quickly compliance conditions can change.
At the same time, civil unrest, strikes and political flashpoints increasingly affected major commercial hubs rather than peripheral markets, complicating assumptions about “low-risk” destinations.
What’s new in 2026
In 2026, expectations around employer duty of care are higher and more explicit.
Insurers, regulators and courts increasingly expect organisations to show that travel risk was assessed proactively, not just managed reactively. Major insurers and travel risk providers have warned that duty of care failures linked to geopolitical events are a growing source of claims and disputes.
At the same time, geopolitical developments are unfolding faster. Airspace closures, sanctions updates and security incidents can occur within hours, leaving little opportunity to intervene once an employee is already in transit.
The bar is shifting from “responded appropriately” to “anticipated foreseeable risk”.
How this could knock you off course
Duty of care failures normally arise from assumptions rather than negligence.
An employee travels to a destination where the security situation is deteriorating rapidly, and evacuation plans are unclear.
A sanctions update makes certain transactions or movements unlawful mid-trip.
A flight rerouting forces an unplanned transit through a restricted jurisdiction.
Local unrest or infrastructure disruption leaves staff stranded without clear escalation routes.
In these situations, organisations may face legal claims, insurance disputes or regulatory scrutiny if they cannot demonstrate that risks were identified and mitigated in advance. Legal commentary increasingly highlights how duty of care extends beyond physical safety to include foreseeable geopolitical and regulatory risk.
What starts as a geopolitical black swan event can quickly turn into a compliance and liability issue for businesses.
How to mitigate the risks
The world is more volatile than it’s been since the end of the Cold War. For businesses with lots of staff on the move, the stakes are higher than ever. Proactive
☑ Incorporate real-time risk intelligence into travel approval processes, rather than relying on annual destination reviews.
☑ Reassess risk where conditions change between booking and departure, and ensure escalation routes are clear and tested.
☑ Align mobility, travel, legal and security teams so decisions can be made quickly when sanctions, security or political conditions shift.
Employers that can evidence ongoing assessment and communication are far better positioned to defend their actions if incidents occur.
In 2026, duty of care is judged not by your intent, but by your level of preparedness. Events do not need to be avoidable to create liability. They only need to be foreseeable.
Looking ahead
The challenge for 2026 doesn’t come from any single policy change, system rollout or geopolitical flashpoint. It emerges from the cumulative effect of tighter enforcement, faster-moving regulation and new ways of working colliding with mobility frameworks designed for a different era.
Enforcement is automated. Policy is volatile. Travel behaviour is shifting. And small errors now carry outsized consequences.
What worked in previous years will not hold. Informal workarounds, reactive fixes and siloed ownership leave organisations exposed in an environment with less discretion and greater scrutiny.
The organisations that will succeed in 2026 will treat mobility as a strategic capability, not an administrative function. They will build visibility across teams, anticipate risks earlier, and embed compliance into decision-making, not just documentation.
That’s why you should join our upcoming workshop, The Mobility and Travel Playbook for 2026.
Hosted by Centuro Global co-founder Asma Bashir, alongside senior practitioners from leading corporates, this hands-on session will help teams move from reaction to readiness.
We will review the lessons of 2025, unpack the key risks and opportunities ahead, and work through practical planning sessions on data, employee experience, communications and cross-functional alignment.
You will leave with a clear view of how to handle what’s coming, and a focused action plan to hit the ground running in Q1.
Places are limited.
👉 Register here
