Managing US Business Travel from Europe: VAT Reclaim, Currency, and GDPR-Compliant Booking

If you run travel or finance for a European company sending people to the US, three questions decide whether a trip is clean or a month-end headache: how much tax you can reclaim, what the currency conversion actually costs, and whether moving traveler data to a US platform is GDPR-safe. The answers are not the ones most European teams expect, starting with the fact that there is no US VAT to reclaim at all. European business travel spend is set to reach €389.9 billion in 2026, and a growing share of it heads across the Atlantic. This guide walks through all three.

Can you reclaim VAT on US business travel?

The honest answer surprises most European finance teams: there is no US VAT to reclaim, because the United States has no value-added tax. It charges sales tax, a single-stage tax applied at the final point of sale that businesses generally cannot recover on their purchases. Treating a US trip like a VAT-country trip is how European teams waste hours chasing a refund that does not exist.

• US sales tax is not VAT, and usually not recoverable: Unlike EU VAT, US sales tax carries no input-credit mechanism for businesses, and there is no federal refund for foreign visitors. A couple of states, Louisiana and Texas, run limited visitor refund schemes, but they are narrow and state-specific, not a program you can build a reclaim process around.
• What you actually reclaim sits on the European side: The recoverable tax on a transatlantic trip is the EU VAT on the European legs, a flight, a lounge, ground transport, or a hotel night booked with EU VAT, recovered through your normal EU VAT return. The usual reason it goes unclaimed is missing paperwork, so the fix is capturing the itemized hotel folio and invoice at the point of spend, not reconstructing it weeks later. Finance leads at a European logistics company pressed us repeatedly on VAT reclamation for their EU entities, and the practical answer was that travelers must collect the itemized hotel folio at checkout, because a platform booking invoice alone rarely carries reclaimable VAT.) A platform like ITILITE captures those itemized folios at booking so the reclaimable spend is documented from the start.
• Across your whole program, the unclaimed amount is large: An estimated $30 billion a year in recoverable business-travel VAT goes unclaimed globally, inside a market worth roughly $64 billion. Almost all of that loss traces to missing or non-itemized documentation, which is exactly the gap disciplined folio capture closes across your EU and rest-of-world travel.

Here is the distinction that trips people up, side by side.

How to handle currency and FX on US trips

Every US trip your European team takes carries a currency cost most programs never measure: the 1% to 3% foreign-transaction markup on card spend converted from euros or pounds into dollars. On a large US program that markup quietly becomes a five-figure line nobody budgeted.

• The markup stacks, and personal cards are the worst case: When an employee fronts a US hotel on a personal card, they absorb the network cross-border charge plus their bank's FX markup, then wait to be reimbursed in euros at a different rate. Company-issued and virtual cards move that spend onto a central account and keep the FX off personal cards, the same control logic in corporate travel card benefits and in running centralized payments for the whole program.
• Know which exchange rate applies, and when: The rate at booking, at settlement, and at reimbursement can all differ, and the gap is real money. A finance lead at a European company asked which exchange rate applies when spend is converted across EUR and GBP, the kind of question that decides whether FX cost stays visible or gets buried. Pin down the conversion rule with your platform before you roll it out.
• Report in your base currency: Your travelers spend in dollars, but your board reads euros or pounds, so a platform like ITILITE reconciles USD spend back into your base currency automatically rather than leaving finance to normalize it by hand. That is the difference between a live number and a month-end project, and it is core to real expense management.

GDPR-compliant booking for US travel

A US booking moves your traveler's passport number, date of birth, and itinerary across the Atlantic, which makes it a GDPR-governed data transfer. Since 10 July 2023, that transfer is lawful without extra safeguards when the US platform is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, the European Commission's adequacy decision for EU-to-US data flows.

• The Data Privacy Framework is your legal basis: It lets EU personal data flow to US companies self-certified on the framework list without Standard Contractual Clauses or other Article 46 tools. Your first check on any US platform is simple: confirm it appears on the framework list.
• Sign the DPA and check the sub-processors: A data-processing agreement should set out what traveler data the platform holds, why, and for how long, and name the sub-processors (airlines, hotels, GDS) that touch it. Booking through a managed platform rather than dozens of consumer sites also shrinks how many places that data lands.
• Collect the minimum and set retention: GDPR's data-minimization principle means holding only what the booking needs and deleting it on a schedule, not keeping passport scans indefinitely in an inbox. A platform like ITILITE that centralizes this beats travelers emailing documents around, which is where most EU-to-US programs actually leak data.

Running VAT, currency, and GDPR from one platform

The three problems share one fix: a platform that captures the right data at booking and bills you the right way, so finance is not reconciling tax, currency, and compliance by hand after every trip. Managed booking also tightens the duty-of-care and corporate travel risk management picture the moment your people land in the US.

In practice that means three things working together. For VAT, the platform captures itemized hotel folios and invoices at the point of spend, so your finance team can reclaim the EU VAT it is entitled to. For currency, it bills per entity in local currency and puts spend on company or virtual cards, keeping the FX markup off personal cards. For GDPR, it handles traveler data on a Data Privacy Framework footing and tags each record by entity and cost center for clean reconciliation. ITILITE brings those together in one corporate travel booking platform, and if you are still shortlisting providers, the best business travel companies in the US is a useful starting point.