More Ways to Set Travel Policy in TravelBank

What’s New

With this latest release, companies can use the TravelBank app to create, communicate, and enforce their travel policy in even more ways. Company admin can set advance booking rules, define hard caps for travel-related costs, and build in the appropriate amount of budget flexibility for your organization. Despite allowing for highly-customized nuances, TravelBank travel policies will continue to be easy to adopt and enforce through automated manager approvals and booking notifications.

To keep the lines of communication clear for all users, employees will have access to view their own travel policy parameters and experience touchpoints built-in to the discovery and booking processes so they know they’re making the right choice for your organization every time.

Administrators

Even More Ways to Set Travel Policy in TravelBank

As an admin on your company’s TravelBank account, you now have even more flexibility in creating and managing your organization’s travel policies on the company settings page. Set independent policies for flights and lodging with advance booking requirements, cost hard caps, and customize TravelBank’s dynamic real-time budget to fit your travelers’ needs with a defined threshold for budget flexibility. It’s as simple as toggling on the policy rules that your organization wants to enforce, and customizing them as needed to fit your travel program’s unique needs.

We built this feature to be easy enough for companies that are still building out their travel program to have a guided experience in creating policies that fit their organization, while incorporating the flexibility for nuanced controls that allow complex travel programs, with existing policies in place, to enforce their rules with increased productivity.

Advance Booking Requirements

We know that travel costs can fluctuate dramatically across a matter of days, which is why we are giving you the ability to customize advance booking requirements. This feature allows your company to indicate the number of days before a trip that an employees needs to book their travel in order to be considered in policy.

Advance booking requirements can help incentivize and encourage employees with pre-planned business travel to book their flights and hotels earlier, usually at lower rates, while still allowing for the manager to approve of last minute situations that do crop up in business travel without triggering a lengthy approval process.

Cost Hard Caps

TravelBank’s real-time budget will tell employees and managers alike the cost of flights, hotels, and more for an upcoming trip. Sometimes, however, your organization might want to identify instances of high travel spend. In these cases you can set hard caps for flight costs or hotel nightly rates so you can flag high spend for review before it occurs.

Budget Flexibility

While TravelBank’s real-time budget helps employees benchmark the cost of travel and make the best selection to balance cost and their travel needs, business travel is incredibly nuanced, and exceptions can be necessary. You know best how strictly your team should be held to the budget, so budget flexibility allows you to set a dollar amount or percentage of flexibility for your travelers’ budgets to be considered in policy.

Notifications and Approvals

Once you select which travel policy rules to turn on, you can select control measures for flight and lodging bookings. Travel policies in TravelBank support both approvals and notifications so you can enforce your organization’s policy without creating barriers for your employees. Each policy can trigger booking approvals or notifications for all bookings, based on out of policy activity, or not at all. With flexible controls, managers can stay informed and empowered in the compliance of their department’s travel.

Employees

Policy Education

Company administrators create travel policies to ensure that employees who travel for work are safe and happy. At TravelBank, our goal is to create an experience that is great for all users (administrators and employees alike) by ensuring that employees have a travel policy and are able to easily understand their travel policy guidelines to make informed decisions and seamlessly book travel within policy. And for those situations that may arise where out of policy travel is needed, TravelBank helps employees understand why the flight or hotel selected is out of policy, and how to submit it for manager approval.

To provide transparent policy education for travelers, TravelBank allows employees to easily view their travel policy guidelines, integrates in-app visual education throughout the travel search and booking experiences that alerts users if they’ve selected a flight or hotel that falls outside of policy – whether that is because the travel is over budget or booked too close to the day of departure – and allows travelers to request approval of out of policy travel, if necessary.