Why you need a travel meal program, and how to build one

It happens too often: A member of your team is travelling for work, but they’re left to figure out their meals on their own. Flights and hotels were locked in from the start, but there isn’t a similar program for meals. What should they expense? How much is too much? They try to follow the meal policy, save the receipt, and hope it works out.

The problem is more expensive than it looks. According to the 2025 GBTA Business Travel Index Outlook, meals account for nearly 1 in 5 corporate travel dollars. Meal spending is significant—and it’s growing. And for a lot of companies, it’s the least controlled part of their travel budget.

In a recent webinar, Arianna Etemadieh and Denny Parker-Todd discussed why meals are the forgotten category in modern travel programs, and what better meal management actually looks like. Here’s a summary of what they covered.

The meal management problem most travel programs overlook

Most businesses have figured out how to manage flights and hotels, and travelers know what to expect. They choose within set guardrails, like certain airfare classes or nightly hotel costs, and policy gets enforced at their point of decision.

Meanwhile, meals can put the burden of compliance solely on the traveler. The traveler has to check how much they can spend, put it on a corporate card or pay out of pocket, save the receipt, and hope the expense report clears. Policy gets checked after the fact, not before. It’s a process that adds up in time and frustration, often pulling employees away from more impactful work. As Arianna put it, “That’s a fundamentally different and less-than-ideal experience than what we’ve built for other major travel categories.”

The financial stakes make this issue worth solving. Business dining spend grew 5.3% in 2025, according to Dinova’s Spring 2026 State of Business Dining Report, while Bureau of Labour Statistics data shows food-away-from-home prices up 3.8% from 2024 to 2025. It’s a cost that’s outpacing the tools most programs use to manage it.

3 principles for a meal program that actually works

Arianna and Denny broke down what an effective meal program looks like, organized around 3 key ideas.

Guide the decision, not the receipt
A well-designed meal program builds the guardrails into the ordering process itself, similar to the flight and hotel policies mentioned above. That way, the traveler gets guidance at the point of purchase instead of getting audited after the fact.

Flex by trip type
A one-day client visit has different meal needs than a four-day conference or a week-long project engagement. A good program accounts for that with different budgets, different rules, and different contexts.

See spending as it happens
Real-time spending data means you can spot trends and adjust budgets before costs become problems. Earlier this year, Denny’s team noticed spend spiking, ran a cost analysis, and implemented a threshold on the spot. “That’s a shift from enforcement to management,” he said, “and it’s what makes a meal program sustainable at scale.”

How Uber for Business puts the principles into practice

Uber for Business makes meal program management simpler for everyone involved.

Travelers can order through the Uber Eats app (that they likely already have and use in their personal lives), which gives them access to 1.4 million merchant partners across 10,000+ cities on 6 continents. They switch to their business profile at checkout and order within budget, and the meal gets billed directly to the company or their corporate card.

Travel managers can create distinct programs through the Uber for Business dashboard, setting different budget limits and ordering rules for scenarios like one-day trips, multi-day conferences, or client travel. And for one-off occasions not covered by your programs, such as team events and client dinners, vouchers offer a flexible way to cover team members and guests. Since you only pay for what's redeemed, there’s no need to worry about unused balances.

Finance teams also get clean data without chasing anyone down. Receipts are automatically categorized and synced to an expense provider partner, like SAP Concur, Navan, Brex, Ramp, or Expensify, with expense codes selectable at the point of ordering. These automations add up: Denny’s team saved 6 figures in productivity value in a single quarter.

Where to start simplifying meal management

Not every meal needs to run through a managed program. For instance, a client meal in a sit-down restaurant where you pay at the table would still get expensed the traditional way—just make sure your team member grabs the receipt!

The bigger opportunity is everything else, like the room service on a Tuesday night, the meal waiting at the hotel lobby after a late flight, or the quick lunch between meetings. Those routine meals are likely getting the same heavyweight expense treatment as a client dinner. A good meal program pulls them out of that pile so that when someone does submit a receipt, it’s because the situation actually called for it.

Arianna framed it simply: Start with the meals where the manual process isn’t necessary, and build from there.

Ready to rethink how your team manages meal spending?

Stop chasing receipts and start designing a program your travelers want to use. Get started with Uber for Business today, or watch the full webinar to hear Arianna and Denny walk through the framework in detail.

*Products and features mentioned in this article may not be available in your region.