Business travel elasticity has traditionally been around 0.4, meaning business travellers will tolerate higher fees with only a small drop in demand. But there would still be a drop.

What no one has mentioned here so far is that the $250 additional visa fee is refundable. But it's not automatically refunded. You have apply for it after meeting some basic conditions. So for businesses, it's really a much smaller administrative cost.

So far the process for applying for the refund hasn't been established. So it's all a bit of a hot mess still.

Ironically cash strapped startups might not care like a big multinational would.

Travel expenses in a bearaucracy can get weird and people who don't care about the business case are in charge of travel expenses, and they only get recognition by cutting costs, often in stupid ways.

I worked at a company like that and to give an example of the results of such a bearaucracy, they had this 20 thousand dollar product that shipped maybe 500 units a year. For some reason they became fixated on if they could delete a 25 cent part to reduce cost. The team sized the regulatory work needed to evaluator and presented the 60 thousand dollar estimate and figured that would be the end of it, no way you would spend 60k to maybe cut total company cost by 125 dollars per year. To their surprise the project was approved, they did the work, and confirmed the 25 cent part was still needed to be in compliance with some government regulations...

I already said it's not about 1 person, it's about a team. I see you're finally adding the caveats "for an important reason", that's what I've been saying all along. Now you just have to add the other things I've been saying: For training and random conferences, it adds up. It's about the total cost. Etc. Ok I think this has reached its end point, ciao.