Video conferencing is the most natural form of distant communications available today.
Those are some nice words, but what do they mean for your bottom line? How does video conferencing compare with business travel?
Does video conferencing offer advantages over travel? Or are there areas where traveling to a meeting is superior to using video calls?
In this blog, we cover the advantages and disadvantages of video conferencing when compared with business travel.
Let’s get into it!
Video Conferencing Is Cost-Effective
When compared with business travel, video conferencing is more cost-effective and time efficient. Let’s take each of those in turn.
Video conferencing can provide significant cost savings when compared with business travel, especially if travel includes teams or groups of employees. This isn’t just marketing speak: the numbers don’t lie.
According to the Business Travel News’s 2025 Corporate Travel Index (external link), the median cost for a business traveler to visit one of their set of 100 US cities is $334 per day. (Tucson at $334.09 and Minneapolis at $333.73 are the median cities.)
Business Travel News uses corporate pricing in their estimates. For many cities that business travelers commonly visit, that number rises to over $400 per day. And if you visit New York City? $670 per day!
This number includes the average prices of hotel, food, and car rental — no other incidental expenses. What happens when you include travel?
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (external link), the average domestic airline itinerary fare from the largest cities is frequently over $300, often over $400. These numbers are for all travelers, not just business travelers, which means the numbers don’t apply to business class tickets, which add much more money.
Using these sources, here are some prices you can expect for two-day business trips:
- From Atlanta to Milwaukee = $1,016.28 ($396.12 + $310.08 x 2)
- From Dallas to Miami = $1,203.73 ($392.31 + $405.71 x 2)
- From St. Louis to San Francisco = $1,353.53 ($383.61 + $484.96 x 2)
- From Philadelphia to Denver = $1,139.83 ($364.73 + $387.55 x 2)
In other words, you pretty much have to expect that a two-day business trip that requires air travel from anywhere in the US to anywhere in the US will cost a minimum of $1,000.
Remember that these are just averages that don’t take into account incidental expenses. And what happens if you fall on the more expensive side of the average? We all know how expensive hotels are getting.
Booking.com, who know a thing or two about travel expenses, estimate that the average business trip for the average worker costs $1,771 (external link). And if you’re a decision-maker, that number goes up.
Most importantly, these numbers are for one traveler. If you send a team of six to Milwaukee, it’ll be much more expensive.
These numbers also only apply to domestic travel within the US. International tickets can be much more expensive than domestic tickets, plus travelers need to deal with security and customs.
How much does video conferencing cost? There are two costs associated with video conferencing: equipment and platform licensing.
Video conferencing equipment is used multiple times, which means the savings add up over time, not typically in the initial investment. (Although even a premium video conferencing system might only cost as much as a single business-class airplane ticket.)
Here are a few video conferencing solutions for a range of room sizes.
Note: Prices are current as of date of publication (March 20, 2025) and are subject to change. Given prices are MSRP and don’t reflect the discounted pricing we typically offer, so check the website!
- Logitech Rally Bar Huddle with Tap IP = $2,299.00
- Poly Studio X72 with TC10 = $7,626.95
- Yealink MVC S40-C5-000 = $3,799.00
There are other equipment costs to take into account, too, which might include HD displays, expansion microphones, mount brackets, AV carts, cables and adapters, computers, and so on. You might look into Microsoft Teams Rooms Certified equipment and Zoom Rooms Certified equipment, too.
To mitigate these costs, you’ll likely be able to repurpose existing equipment for video conferencing like a TV or USB speakerphone. Equipment might also serve multiple purposes. Your laptop won’t only be used for video conferencing, after all.
These numbers show that initial costs for video conferencing equipment might be more than a single business trip. But that one trip is just that: one trip.
If you buy a video conferencing system, you’ll be able to use that system potentially hundreds of times before needing to replace anything.
On top of equipment costs, video conferencing requires licenses. While there are on-premise video conferencing solutions, a vast majority of businesses use some form of cloud service, which means on-going subscriptions.
Licensing can add up but will still be much cheaper than travel.
Here’s how those numbers work out at the moment. Definitely check to see if prices have changed since the publication of this blog.
Here’s the info on Microsoft Teams user licenses (external link). A Microsoft Teams Essentials costs $4 per user per month when paid yearly. Microsoft 365 Business Standard — which also includes desktop versions of the all-important Microsoft apps like Excel and Word — costs $12.50 per user per month when paid yearly. (Pro tip: Microsoft has promotions fairly frequently, which can save your business real money.)
Here’s the info on Microsoft Teams Rooms licenses (external link). A Microsoft Teams Rooms Basic license is free, while a Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro license costs $40 per room per month when paid yearly.
Here’s the info on Zoom Workplace licenses and Zoom Rooms licenses (external links). Zoom Workplace Pro is similar, costing $13.33 per user per month when paid yearly. A Zoom Rooms license costs $499 per room yearly.
Here’s the info on Google Workspace licenses (external link). These licenses also include Google Meet, Gemini, Drive, and the Workspace suite of apps — costs $7 per user per month when paid yearly for the Business Starter level and $14 per user per month when paid yearly for the Business Standard level.
One thing to know: using BYOD video conferencing devices — which we covered in a recent blog, “What Are BYOD Devices for Video Conferencing?” — can also allow you to leverage a single user account for group video calls vs needing a room license.
Now, it takes a lot of months for $12.50 to add up to a single business trip that costs $1,000 — 80 months, if you’re wondering, which is 6 years and 8 months. And that business trip doesn’t pay for your spreadsheets! And if you pay for a room license, $500 is still half of $1,000 last time we checked.
All in all, in terms of cost efficiency, video conferencing is miles ahead of corporate travel. It’s also miles ahead in time efficiency.
Video Conferencing Is Time-Efficient, Good for Teams, and Offers Helpful Features
Video conferencing significantly reduces the amount of time you need to spend to have meetings.
Business travel takes much more time than video conferencing. This doesn’t require much explanation. If you travel, you need to, well, travel places and traveling takes time. Airports, taxis, rideshares, hotel lobbies, rental offices, train stations, public transit, escalators, ramps up, ramps down — they’re all avoided.
With video conferencing, a single person could easily chat with clients in China, Germany, Argentina, and Chicago all in the same day. Even the Flash would be impressed! Allied with time-efficiency are the positive benefits that video conferencing can offer groups.
First off, you avoid having to arrange multiple itineraries, hotels, rideshares, restaurant reservations, and so on. You don’t have to worry about someone’s flight being delayed or their taxi being stuck in a traffic jam.
Instead, you just need to gather everyone in the meeting room, then they can go back to their work immediately. This applies to remote workers and home office workers, too, who can call in to a conference even if they’re working from a café halfway across the world or from their recently renovated basement. These team members are fully integrated, no travel necessary.
You won’t need to travel between campuses, so the CEO of an organization with locations in Trenton, Mobile, and Cheyenne can keep in touch with everyone from home base in Sacramento.
As video conferencing platforms evolve, they’ve started adding features to improve the experience even more, like break-out rooms that let teams split off from the main group call.
For example, a marketing team composed of remote workers can hear feedback on the new tourist magazine from the decision-makers, then split off into a smaller group call with digital whiteboarding and content editing tools at their fingertips.
With the rise of AI in business technology, these video conferencing features are only going to get better. For example, we covered recently how you can get real-time AI meeting summaries in Microsoft Teams Rooms using Microsoft 365 Copilot.
You can also get full transcriptions of meetings automatically with Microsoft Teams, giving you a written record of a meeting to consult later or to bring other team members who couldn’t be present up to speed.
These are only a few of the features that video conferencing platforms offer to improve group communications.
What Are the Disadvantages of Video Conferencing?
We’ve been talking about the positives of video conferencing, but there are some definite advantages to in-person meetings.
Video conferencing is the most natural form of distant communications currently available. “Distant” is the important word here. In-person communications is still, in many ways, the gold standard.
With video conferencing, you miss many of the physical cues that are essential to comprehension. You miss handshakes, too.
Because video calls tend to be scheduled and ended more strictly than in-person meetings, you also miss the casual or impromptu aspects of meeting in person. For example, you don’t get to go out to a lunch with a client where you both get distracted by the baseball game they’re playing on the TVs. The game is your team against theirs. This friendly rivalry gets you talking, building a friendship that can have lasting effects, improving trust.
Or maybe you’ve traveled to the annual concrete suppliers’ convention to meet with a company who’ve started integrating Ancient Roman techniques into modern production. You get to see the improved concrete with in-person examples.
By the way: wondering what we mean by that example? Check out this article from MIT (external link).
Integrating groups into a single meeting is simpler with video conferencing, but for situations that have numerous groups of people, traveling to a convention is still the way to go.
Conventions let you see what you don’t know you should see. That’s confusing. Here’s an example: when you go to the library to find a particular book on home improvement, you’ll also see all the other books on home improvement in that section. And maybe one of those other books has the answer you really need, not the one you looked up online. That’s one scenario that video conferencing can’t replace.
As the world goes increasingly digital, these types of face-to-face interactions are still incredibly important, especially when it comes to networking and building trust. Humans are social animals, and digital communications still haven’t fully replicated every aspect of those basic social impulses.
On the other hand, video conferencing can help you tighten your budget, save time, integrate dispersed workers, and provide desirable features into your everyday work.