Consultants Live Out of Suitcases. That’s a Process Problem.

Consulting firms pride themselves on structure. Every engagement has a playbook — a kickoff plan, a staffing model, a client schedule, and a slide deck ready before the first Monday meeting.

But when it comes to housing those same consultants, everything turns into chaos.

The Monday Morning Problem

Here’s a familiar picture:
A new project gets signed in Dallas. The delivery team flies in on Sunday night. Half of them are in hotels, a few in extended stays, and one unlucky analyst is still hunting for a place with decent Wi-Fi.

For the first few weeks, everyone lives out of suitcases. The travel desk is swamped. Expenses spike. Admins chase invoices from four different vendors.

Multiply that across 20 projects, 10 cities, and 1,000 consultants, and you’ve got a hidden operational problem that no one owns.

The Mobility Blind Spot in Consulting

The consulting business runs on people — not offices, not real estate. Yet housing for those people remains one of the most fragmented, least digitized parts of the workflow.

Every project kickoff triggers a scramble:

• Who’s going where?

• For how long?

• What’s the housing budget?

• Who’s booking what?

In theory, these should be standardized processes. In reality, they’re scattered across spreadsheets, travel emails, and shared drives.

No one has real visibility. Finance doesn’t know the total spend. Mobility doesn’t know where people are staying. Project managers don’t know when leases end.

It’s 2025, and most global firms still manage housing like it’s 2005.

When Housing Chaos Becomes a Cost Center

Let’s talk numbers for a second.

Housing and travel represent 10–15% of total project delivery costs for large consulting firms. But because the data is fragmented, most firms can’t actually quantify where that money goes.

They see the total, not the waste.

That waste comes from:

• Last-minute bookings at surge rates

• Extended stays in mismatched locations

• Manual processing errors in expense reports

• Burnout for the teams managing logistics

If you treat this as “just travel,” you miss how deeply it affects delivery timelines, profitability, and employee well-being.

Consultants Don’t Need More Points. They Need Predictability.

The truth is, consultants don’t want more hotel points. They want consistency.

They want to know they’ll land in a safe, comfortable, well-located apartment for the duration of the engagement — not hop between bookings every week.

They want one channel for housing logistics, not five.

And admin teams want control — visibility across all projects, city-level forecasting, supplier tracking, and consolidated invoicing.

This is where consulting firms are starting to realize that housing isn’t travel management. It’s mobility orchestration.

Housing as a Workflow, Not an Afterthought

Think about it: every other process in a consulting firm has a system.
Staffing? Managed through resource allocation software.
Expenses? Automated with reporting tools.
Knowledge sharing? Digital libraries and collaboration platforms.

But housing — arguably one of the most repeatable, predictable workflows — still lives in email threads.

This is why the smartest firms are now re-designing it as a structured workflow that scales with their project velocity.

An intelligent housing system should:

• Centralize sourcing for all project locations

• Verify suppliers and pricing in advance

• Integrate with staffing tools to anticipate demand

• Automate billing and documentation

• Offer consultants self-serve booking within defined parameters

That’s how you eliminate the scramble.

The Scale Problem

Here’s what’s changed: consulting firms aren’t sending 10 people to a single office anymore. They’re sending hundreds of consultants across dozens of client sites simultaneously.

Hybrid work, shorter engagements, and rolling transitions have made housing patterns unpredictable — but also more data-rich.

Every project leaves behind insights: length of stay, preferred areas, pricing patterns, supplier reliability.
When you aggregate that data, you can forecast future housing needs with near-surgical accuracy.

The problem isn’t lack of data — it’s that no one’s looking at it as a unified process.

Burnout Isn’t Just on the Consultants

Talk to anyone who’s managed housing for a consulting firm and you’ll hear the same thing: “It’s chaos every week.”

Housing coordination sits somewhere between HR, procurement, and travel — which means no one fully owns it. Admin teams operate on reactive cycles, constantly chasing availability and juggling approvals.

That’s not sustainable.

Housing management should feel like a system, not a scramble. And when it’s systematized, admin teams get their hours back. Consultants get consistency. Finance gets predictability. Everyone wins.

The Future of Consulting Mobility

The firms that will stand out over the next few years are the ones that treat housing as a function — not a favor.

Imagine a project pipeline where every new client kickoff automatically triggers a housing workflow:

• AI identifies upcoming locations

• Cross-references verified suppliers

• Reserves preferred inventory

• Syncs with payroll and expense systems for unified billing

That’s not futuristic — it’s just overdue.

The technology already exists. What’s missing is the mindset shift to use it.

Consulting Is About Structure. Housing Should Be Too.

Consultants live out of suitcases because firms still treat housing as a side job.
But when you zoom out, it’s not a travel issue — it’s a process issue.

And like every other process in consulting, once you define it, digitize it, and measure it, it starts performing better.

That’s the real opportunity here: to bring structure to something that has silently shaped consultant experience and project cost for decades.

Because if you can model client strategies down to the decimal, you can definitely plan where your own people sleep.