Business travel is bouncing back—are you prepared? Our travel solution experts discuss the current state of business travel, time-saving process improvements with an all-in-one platform, incentives to make better business decisions and increase user adoption, and expanding control and visibility into your travel spend. Plus, they share how U.S. Bank and TravelBank customers can earn an additional 1% back on travel spend.
Webinar Transcript:
My name is Kayla Avoa. I’m a relationship manager here in our US Bank, our middle market group in corporate payment systems. And we’re excited for our session today to discuss post-pandemic business travel. We know that the landscape for travel is changing and employees are returning to their travel norms after the pandemic.
And in order to do that, we’re going to take a look at TravelBank. With us today from TravelBank, our Chief Revenue Officer, Josh Abich, and Director of Sales, Dan Duffy. And a little bit about TravelBank before I turn it over to them. US Bank did acquire TravelBank last December. It’s an all-in-one expense and travel management solution that integrates with your commercial card program here with us at US Bank, as well as other tools like your ERP, single sign-on, and HRIS solutions. Now I’ll turn it over to Josh.
Josh
Thank you so much. Hello. And thank you all for joining us today. I head up the revenue organization at TravelBank. As Chief Revenue Officer, I lead our customer facing teams and have the ultimate responsibility and pleasure of serving all of our customers throughout their entire journey with TravelBank’s, starting from marketing through to sales, into implementation all the way through customer success. As Kayla mentioned, we launched a partnership with US Bank back in 2020 to offer a new, different and innovative travel and expense solution to US Bank customers. Throughout that partnership, we were able to validate from many of our joint and mutual customer wins, the business impact that we were creating for our collective customers. And that partnership ended up to be so successful that it led to the eventual acquisition of TravelBank. And now here we are together, better together in serving over a hundred joint US Bank customers. Today we look forward to our discussion on the state of post-pandemic business travel. Over to you, Dan.
Dan
Thank you, Josh. I lead our sales and partnership efforts. I’ll be doing a demo at the end today. A little bit about me. I’ve been in the travel industry for over 15 years and coming up on three years at TravelBank.
Josh
All right, thank you, Dan. So let’s get into what we have planned for you guys today. First, we’ll set some context as to where the industry is today. We’ll talk about really what all this means as business travelers, employees, and, and companies. We will leave you with a few actions that you can take away from our discussion today. And then certainly we’ll discuss how TravelBank can help prepare you for what’s ahead as well as give you an actual demonstration of how it works.
Josh
Let’s start out with some good news: post-pandemic business travel is bouncing back. We are seeing strong returns from our own customer base, as well as the global business travel industry. The bad news is that the industry is still very much in recovery mode and continues to face some really, really big challenges. Two challenges that you could probably sum up here in front of this beautiful slide is that number one, operationally the industry is still having a really, really difficult time of handling their staffing capacity needs.
Josh
So, number one, it’s been super difficult for suppliers to bring everybody back who was either laid off or furloughed, let go. And then further challenge, we’re seeing an ever-increasing demand of business travel that’s made it very, very hard for suppliers to keep pace with the revenge of travel. Number two, economically speaking, it’s just a lot more expensive to travel today. Inflation has hit this industry so hard. Clearly here rates are up 20 to 30% right now compared to this time last year. That’s a really, really big deal. So, good news is it’s encouraging to see the bounce back. It’s awesome to be back face-to-face with our employees, our customers, our partners. But let’s face it, things today just aren’t what they were a few years ago. So, with that, let’s talk about really what this all means for your employees as well as you as managers and overall organizations who travel.
Josh
This journey is a typical experience. So, I’m going to start out on a really, really high note: I can go to an amazing conference that I’ve been wanting to go to all year. And I start my process. I go online and I find out, wow, these prices are so expensive, I’m not used to that, so let me go ask for approval. So I asked for approval for my trip. A few days go by. And at last, my flight is now approved. I go to book, but looks like there’s been a change from when I last submitted my flight for approval. Who knows, perhaps the price went up, no more seats are available, the flight sold out, whatever it is, it’s likely a change. I’ve got to go back to square one, repeat the same process, and finally my flight is booked.
Josh
I get to the airport and lines are so long. Even if you have Clear, even if you have TSA PreCheck, those lines are long. So you finally make it through security, come to find out the flight’s been delayed. You get a notice that it’s been delayed, and then you get another delayed notice and another delayed notice until the flight ultimately gets canceled. So what to do now? Do you wait in line to get on a phone with the airline? Perhaps you wait. You simply rebook on your own. Whatever it is, it’s likely that you are trying to figure out what to do in real time on your own. In the end, you do get to go to the conference, but you come home frustrated because now you’ve got all these receipts and out-of-pocket expenses.
Josh
The joys of going to the conference are quieted really by this expense report process that’s also looming over you. You finally get to the expense report process, you submit it, the manager gets it, manager’s upset. You went over budget, didn’t book within the policies that were set forth. And no one’s really happy. So let’s look at now on the other side of how this shows up as managers or approvals. So managers are happy because they’re working on their core priorities, probably not having to worry about travel requests. But pretty soon you come to realize that travel requests are coming in and that pre-pandemic budgets are outdated. So all of these requests coming in really don’t make sense because everything’s so much more expensive these days. So everything is sort of falling outside of policy and now it’s become a very frustrating manual process.
Josh
So, with that, you find yourself getting probably a little bit more upset and frustrated because now you’re just constantly fielding special approvals because you find your teams traveling last minute and realize, hey, is there a really an incentive to comply within this vague travel policy that’s in place? And furthermore, is this travel policy that’s in place? Is it the right one? Because maybe we haven’t looked at it since before the pandemic. So travel gets completed, funds are misspent, budget’s not in place, but we’re not done yet. So really for managers and accounting, this part of the process really is the most frustrating. So now your team has to log into multiple systems just to find out that the travel actuals are not what you expected them to be.
Josh
And this becomes a very manual, inefficient and costly and probably very, very painful process for many customers that we speak to and help. So, in the, the end overspend and non-compliance are now just sort of something that are happening all the time, but spotted after the fact.
Dan
Thanks, Josh. I’m a, I’m a little exhausted just trying to, to figure out that flow. So, thanks for painting the picture. Well, there is hope. One of the things that we did early on when we founded TravelBank is understand the inherent challenges that they are in the industry. And one that kept coming up is that travel policies are a headache. The group that’s writing them has to debate – should they do it by city? Should it be flexible, should not be flexible, what type of approvals and things like that.
Dan
And that usually was the number one thing that held up programs from being released. So one thing we did that was very, very unique and still unique within the industry is that instead of need to have an actual static budget, like “all domestic travel under $500 is acceptable. Anything over that isn’t approved.” What we actually did is we developed a proprietary algorithm that for every single search that the user does, we bring up the budget or the average. So it’s real time. So you know, at that time when they’re searching what is the best available rate and it will fluctuate on time and seasonality and those type of things. So, with working with TravelBank, you actually never have to tell us any type of policy parameters because we have a budget tracking tool that will tell you each time. The second cause of friction that we identified is approvals.
Dan
If anything’s out of policy, it has to go to a manager for approval. There’s a lot of friction, it goes to the manager, sometimes the manager doesn’t get to it. By the time it’s approved, that fare might have gone up, the seats might have been taken. So we developed a soft approval. So there’s visual cues throughout the booking process that tells the traveler, Hey, you’re out of policy. But there might be a reason, maybe it’s December, they don’t want to go through O’Hare because of a snowstorm, so they’re going to pick another airport. It’s just $20 more than the other flight. So instead of stopping that booking flow, what it does is it, it just alerts the manager and then they have 24 hours to actually cancel that. The third, and I would say the most effective way to handle changes is the team of agents.
Dan
When founding TravelBank, we set our operation up to be 24/7/365 with very seasoned agents. It doesn’t matter if it’s 2:00 PM on a Tuesday or 2:00 AM on a Sunday, your travelers are going to get that support you need through chat, email, or phone support, saving money and cash.
Dan
One thing that we looked at early on as well as how do we always get the best available rate? Cause what we’d hear from travel managers is that the reason that travelers do not want to use these type of sites is they can always find it cheaper online. Well, we had this aha moment, Why don’t we bring in everything online into TravelBank’s? That’s actually what we’ve done. We bring in Expedia rates and other rates. So, the travelers know that they’re getting the most cost-effective rates. They’re fully flexible and refundable. But you don’t have to go out there and negotiate with everything in a hotel because we work with the largest consumer travel companies out there. One thing, this particular to everybody on this call, and I haven’t seen it anywhere in the industry, is, and using TravelBank if you put your US bank card on the back end, this can either be you know, the corporate cards for your users or one card, we give you an additional 1% back on all travel through TravelBank.
Dan
So, this is aside from the competitive rebate that you’re already getting with your travel program. I mean with your card program you also get that 1%. We’ve also enabled rewards and this really drives the right of behavior. So you do have your travel policy and we provide you with that budget. So if a traveler saves, let’s just say a hundred dollars from that budget, they’re able to share in the rewards, which is about 20%. So, if the traveler saves a hundred dollars on a hotel, they’ll get $20 in Amazon gift card or Door Dash gift cards or something similar. I usually get that question, why would I reward travelers doing what they’re supposed to do? Well this is actually going over and beyond because you already have your policy. We’re saying that at this time this is the budget. So they’re staying across the street, let’s just say at the holiday instead of the Marriott.
Dan
And then they share the savings when we have this enabled for our clients, because it is optional, we see up to 30% additional savings with the program. The other way is just being able to track you can’t measure what you can’t track. And so we’re able to actually provide you the complete picture because we are an all-in-one travel expense and credit card management platform. So we know what is booked, what is expense, actually what’s not expense, because we also bring in your US Bank credit card fee. So, if your user has not done their expense report, we actually still have that data. So, you have the full monthly spend you can run reports, we can run reports on cost centers you know how much travel per you know, area is this client meetings, is this internal meeting and those type of things.
Dan
You can start budgeting, you can start seeing the ROI in your travel. And then lastly with conserving costs is we set up a subscription model and it’s very lucrative for US Bank as well because there’s a discount already provided. But it is a subscription model so you actually know your costs, which is very unique because within the industry. And if you’ve worked with a travel provider either now or previously, it’s per booking. So at the end of the year you actually don’t know how much you spent because every time a user calls or changes, there’s a cost for us it’s just per user per month. So it’s easily predictable and budgetable.
Josh
Thanks Dan. So we surveyed about 1500 customers in the mid-market with companies that have revenues of 10 million to a billion dollars. And we learned that the top two priorities of these companies are to, number one, reduce costs, and number two, gain visibility into travel spend. Here’s how you do it. So Duffy mentioned rewards driven behavior. This is exactly how this is accomplished. When your employees go to book, they’re travel within TravelBank, they’re guided by the policies that are set forth woven into the booking process as real time budget. So TravelBank is able to help you understand what real time pricing dynamics are at any given time, which guides a realistic booking flow and staying at hotels that are within budget at any given time. So with that, I am presented options in which I can book my hotel. The travel policy allows me to book up to the limit that’s set forth on the left.
Dan
And, if nobody’s adopted the booking tool, then how can you have reporting and, and predicting costs and ROI. The last bucket I just quickly wanted to talk about is employee happiness. So really how we approach these programs is we want to find that balance between cost savings and employee happiness. We know that your employees are creating revenue on the road. They’re there to do business, you want them happy, healthy, energized. You don’t want them in the very back of the plane in a middle seat, getting to that customer meeting tired and, and just really not happy.
Dan
We want to find that balance and there’s a few ways that we actually do that. The first is just having their back, I would say. So we have a traveler tracker where you have the ability to know where travelers are at any given time. Any travel disruption, if it’s weather, canceled flights, etc., you have peace of mind. Now, behind that, you have our 24/7/365 support. Just recently within the last month there’s a huge hurricane headed towards Florida. I think most people were aware of that we were able to proactively get our travelers out of the harm’s way. There was actually an incentive trip going to Puerto Rico and we were able to rebook everybody or, or get them back home as well. So you have the visibility, but we also have your back.
Dan
The second is very, very important. We are a mobile first, consumer-grade app. So really what that means is it’s very simple to use. You know, we really operate with the philosophy of all the apps today. So you can push a button on your app and your food gets delivered to your house. A car comes to pick you up. That’s how our mobile app is where I would say previously and, and with some of the other tools in the market, they’re cumbersome, they’re clunky, they’re not easy to use. We find that 75 to 80% of our users actually solely use the mobile app. They don’t even go on the desktop because it’s so easy to use. It’s easy to set up, it’s easy to implement and it’s easy to book and approve travel.
Dan
Lastly is fast reimbursement. To really get the most value out of TravelBank, we recommend getting expenses as well. Beause everything booked automatically goes into your expense report. We also use machine learning AI. The more that the users use it the more it’ll start predicting the categories and things like that, which is pretty cool. So we try to eliminate as many clicks as possible. But with fast reimbursements, right? Actually, the quickest in the industry is once-step approval happens, we actually are able to pay the user within 24 hours. So as long as it’s approved by 5:00 PM Pacific the night before, they’ll get it in their bank account the next day. It does change behavior. And the other great thing as well is each of the expense reports can be a combination of your corporate card reconciliation as well as any personal out of pocket from mileage and those type of things. It can be a combination as well, because it’s a full consolidation tool, as well as saving time to anybody that’s going to be reconciling the books with getting all that data into your ERP very seamlessly and accurately.
Josh
Thank you, Dan. Let’s go through three actions that you can consider today. Certainly, we’re here to help you but it’s up to you and of course, and how you wish to engage with us. But let me just give you the three and then we’ll turn it over to Dan and we can get into a deeper demo. So number one, hopefully we’ve given you enough sort of things to think about where you can identify current pain points. So you may not know what inefficiency is currently exists within your travel program today. Perhaps you could get a focus group together across your key stakeholders, your road warriors, your managers, your approvers, your finance and accounting folks, and just talk about how can we improve what’s actually happening today. Number two is take a look at your current budgets. It’s a perfect time, right?
Josh
We’re heading in towards the, you know, the middle of Q4 at least in terms of the calendar year. With a fiscal year ahead, calendar year ahead of 2023, how can we communicate guidelines and ensure compliance? How will you keep pace with this ever changing environment? Things have not yet normalized, so we would expect some continued change throughout this quarter and into the next year until we return to pre-pandemic levels. Number three is optimized with technology. Quite a bit of manual inefficiencies exposed throughout the process. Perhaps there’s some automation that can help you automate some of these manual or costly inefficient processes that you have existing today. And you know, with that we’re certainly more than willing to have this discussion with you, but if not, you know, you could absolutely take away these actions steps today and consider them as you look at your travel program for 2023. With that, let’s turn it back over to Dan, and we’re going to get into a real time demo to demonstrate how TravelBank can actually put some of this in action for you today.
Dan
Perfect. We’ve got plenty of time left, so I do want to walk you through a demo. This is TravelBank. We’ve spent a lot of time, money research just to make it a delightful experience.
I don’t have to jump through a lot of hoops. But since we do have a lot of finance folks and accounting folks on the line, what I’m going to do is I’m going to first jump into the backend, the company settings and then I’ll show you the user experience. With TravelBank, you can actually facilitate yourself. We have a full implementation team that will walk you through implementation. They’ll set up any feeds, integrations travel policy and those type of things. But once you’re up and running, you actually never have to reach out to us. If you did, you would have 24/7 chat support. This is even for product support with expenses. But the first piece of getting set up is loading your employees. You don’t actually need to bring any IT resources, which is really unique.
Dan
We can just import everybody from a CSV file. What that CSV file will have is the user’s first name, last name, email, if there’s an employee ID or department who their manager is or the hierarchy as well as what travel policy or expense policy they fall into. We have the ability to have multiple departments. We know that some users do expense to different departments and then we have permission. Admin would be somebody that’s can go in here and updating of the settings. Finance has a final approval, which goes to reimbursement. This does come up and I didn’t bring it up on the last slide, but with reimbursements we’re able to just still go through your payroll. We just recommend that we handle it for you because a lot of times that is a lot of manualness through the process.
Dan
If I needed to add an employee, it’s very simple to add an employee. They get an email once I add them to sign up for TravelBank and they fall right into the hierarchy. Conversely, if anybody leaves, we can delete them from the system and we can keep all their data as well. So two ways to get everybody in here. One is through our HRIS feed which could take you know, resource just to get that set up. The second way is just through a CSV import. That takes seconds and everybody is ready to go. We also have delegates. If you have anybody within your organization that does travel on behalf of let’s just say an executive or does expenses for an executive, they could be on the actual delegate.
Dan
Let’s get a little into travel. I talked a little bit about the traveler tracker which is available at no cost. You can create as many travel policies as you like. We don’t recommend as many here. This is a demo site, but normally we’ll see like a candidate travel policy and executive policy, and then a default policy, which is for the general population. A couple things I want to bring your attention to: This first policy at the top is what we pull our algorithm from, which I’ll be showing you here in just a bit. Our algorithm that’s going to give you that budget is pulled from economy nonstop. if you did have an executive policy for business class, we can create a different policy, but we also still have some static rules that, that you can enable. The one that we do recommend is advanced purchase over seven days.
Dan
And again, this does not have to be a hard approval, but just letting travelers know, hey, you should be booking ahead of time. A lot of times what we find is that users will book a meeting or a conference but still just wait till week before to actually book their airfare and hotel. So we’re trying to change this behavior and there’s a little ways we can do that. We can still do hard caps if you want to bring that within the system. But what our number one recommendation is budget flexibility. It gives travelers the freedom to book within let’s say 10 or 20 or 30% of that budget. Airfares are pretty consistent. So by giving them some leeway, you know, for me, I’m a United guy, I’ll be able to fly United, which gives me free bags, it gives me a seat upgrade and those type of things for the same costs as if I fly any of their airline where I don’t get those perks. And then we can create notifications. So do you want notifications for all bookings for some bookings or just for out a policy?
Dan
And this is similar with lodging as well. We pull our algorithm from the star rating. So you’ll see that when I get into that. We do a three star rating, 10 miles from your search radius, but we can still do some advanced purchase or nightly rates and those type of things. We can add employees manually or bump them around if we needed to. You can add a business purpose so you can start to see ROI. We have some clients that have a handful of very important customers, so they want to see how much they’re spending to visit them. Or we can just tag these by client. Visit candidate travel internal meetings or SKO with expenses. Very robust policy configurations and rules. Do you require receipts for everything? Do you have a custom or the IRS mileage rate? Do you require descriptions? Do you have allocations? can the traveler pick their own department for allocations or do you want to sign those? We have category rules which will flag any expenses that are out of policy. One thing that I really like is that some customers have a category for breakfast, which could just be, let’s just say $5. We’ll say it’s 10, but other customers will just have meals. So it could be $60 per day for meals. So if it’s recurring spend limit, it does not get flagged until it reaches that threshold. So there can be multiple expenses for that.
Dan
The other thing that we can do is we can actually hide for certain subsets of the population. If you have a subset of users that only expense the three categories, we can put them into their own policy and they’re only going to see those categories just to make it very simple for them to be able to go in and submit expenses. Lastly with the approvals we can set up thresholds. If you wanted everything over a thousand dollars to go to a manager or you wanted a certain category like tuition expense to go to HR first, we can create custom approval rules as well.
Dan
Part of onboarding is bringing in your expense categories. We can format it in a way that it’s very simple and easy to understand for the category, but we can match the alpha numeric for your GL. We have an expense export. This is actually very popular. This is not reporting, this is just at any time. You can come in here, you can pick a date range. Do you want all statuses, do you want all departments? You can actually even rearrange the columns. You can export it and now you have a CSV for all the expenses for the month. Many of our customers actually just use this to import to QuickBooks because it’s simple and easy, but we can also provide a file for you as well. It’s just a very simple way to I would say run pivot tables if you wanted to and it without needing any support or anything like that.
Dan
And lastly is custom fill. We do understand that, you know, besides the category, maybe there are some users that need to account for projects or things of that nature. We can also create custom fields. We have multiple integrations you know, some are APIs, some are SFTP but we will go through the implementation with you and find the easiest and simplest way to get the data to you accurately and efficiently. We’ll go through and we’ll do the integrations. And then lastly, with your commercial cards we have a direct API with US Bank of course. We would feed in all the commercial cards; they would get allocated out to all the end users. And then we would also be able to see the card transactions as well. This is more informational. We do have very robust reporting and analytics, but if you needed to just find out if Josh did his expenses, I can come in here and I can run a status you know, by the card number by the employee and see if there’s expenses in there.
Dan
Tommy went to the, the Hyatt, I could say that he hasn’t done his expenses, so I need to go track him down. So that is the back end. Let’s go to the end user experience. This is really the finance and manager experience, but the end user experience, I’m going to get that email that says, “Welcome to TravelBank.” I’m already going to have everything pre-populated with my policy with my department. So all I need to do is to come in here, fill out my traveler information. If I am traveling, they can put in their date of birth, their TSA information, their TSA pre-check, known traveler number, all the loyalty numbers. They do get credit for all their flight, hotel and car points through TravelBank. We can add a payment method or we can default this to one card for everything. And then for our expense management, they can actually add their bank account.
Dan
This is how we do the 24-hour reimbursement is through ACH, through their bank account, which is completely encrypted. So now that that’s set up, I’m going to book a trip to go visit Josh, say for the Christmas party, I’m going to search flights. And we bring in all the flights. So anything you’d be able to find online, we actually use what’s called the GDS Global Distribution System, which is the same system the airlines uses. You do get all the flights. You also get our discounts attached to it, including round trip one-way, multi-city. We’ll go ahead and search for these flights. It’s out there taking all the different rates taking my preferences into account also in a mileage or membership numbers that I have and it’s going to populate everything. So we tried to make this as simplistic and easy to understand when we provide results.
Dan
The first thing I want to bring your attention to is this budget. So we were talking about that budget a lot. At this point in time, it’s the average across all the airlines is $438 to go from SFO to IAD. so, I can say travelers can book within 20% of this. You know, this does fluctuate. If I did a week later, it might be more because it’s closer to Christmas. So this is a real time benchmark that we recommend that you use. A couple things we’ve done, just to make this very easy to slice and dice is we automatically default to lowest price, but we can also do shortest duration if we wanted to as well, which I normally like just to get there as fast as possible. But we can filter by times, by stops, by airlines, even by airports, you know.
Dan
If I wanted to go into a different airport, I can do that as well as well as amenities. If I click on more options here, there are refundable options, fully refundable options. And then we, what we’ve done is we understood that airlines keep coming out with different fairs, economy plus premium economy, economy extra. And it gets confusing for the travelers. So we know that all two star ratings are all economy, all three are economy plus or that premium. All four is business class. It just makes it simpler for each of the travelers to understand that. We put all as much information as we can on that first page. We know that there’s no stops in between. We get a light meal. I was just on a flight two weeks ago and they provided a meal, which was nice. I haven’t seen that on domestic flights in a while. Power. And I’ll see an on-demand video. So I said, Oh, this is a, this is a long flight, it’s almost five hours. Let’s go ahead and pick this. It’ll automatically default to the return. So I’ll pick this return flight.
Dan
And that is as simple as it is right there. Three screens. Previously, many, many years ago I used to work on another tool and it took about seven to eight screens to get through this. And you can do this in three screens if you know where you’re going. I do book for other people, but this would default for myself. It’s telling me I’m $20 over budget. I do this purposefully because this is a live site, so I don’t want it to book any airfare that I forget about, but it will let the traveler know if this goes for approval. Also, let the manager know.
Dan
Now the nice thing is that I’m going to get an email that shows me that that’s confirmed but also Josh will get an email for approval. And then once it’s finally approved, it will confirm that and then it will go ahead and ticket it. The next thing I’m doing, I’m actually bringing up my phone. This is actually the mobile experience that I was talking about. If I click on the bottom, you can see travel very, very similar to that travel tab that you saw earlier. What I really like is that even the side panel’s the same, you know, so it’s a very congruent experience that it doesn’t look like you’re using different apps. I wanted to chat. I have that 24/7 chat or I can call an agent as well. So, needs to actually remember any numbers, but everything that you can do on the mobile app, you can do on the desktop and vice versa. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go and search for a hotel.
Dan
If I did book that flight, it actually defaults to the hotel search. So it does remember where you’re at throughout the experience. It is searching for a hotel. Remember that second slide I had was cost saving. We do bring in outside rates from Expedia, from booking.com just so that travelers know they have the peace of mind that they’re getting the best deal. The other thing we can do is we do understand that some companies do have their own rates. So where you see Demo Land rate, that would be your rate as well. And then we also have exclusive rates that we bring in just like right here. So this is an exclusive rate with the Double Tree. So we have these visual clues throughout the experience so the travelers can make informed good economic decisions on the type top right, you see $262, that is that budget, right? So this is in San Francisco. It includes taxes, it includes fees. if I wanted a more visual representation, I can actually pull up a map and again it has blue showing what’s in policy.
Dan
And then the rewards. So that’s about, let’s just say, you know, $85 difference right there. So if I do decide to stay at that hotel, I get $9 in rewards. Let’s go ahead and click into that hotel, that’s $180. I can actually look at the pictures. I want to have a meeting in the lobby. I said, Oh, this is nice. And then it has the different rates. There is refundable pay now hotels, there’s refundable pay later, there’s rewards. I’ll go ahead and select this room and it has all my traveler information in there. I can pick a business purpose. It tells me the different cancellation policies with the rewards. I can disable the rewards if I wanted to and then I’m going to request hotel approval.
Dan
Now I did talk about the mobile experience as well. So if I click out of here and let’s go to my, let’s go to expenses telling me my upcoming trips are our waiting approval. But we have an expense report that I already started. So if this was a live booking, that airfare in that hotel would’ve already been in my expense report. Because like I said previously, as everything goes into your expense report, it saves time to forward that or to take pictures with that in there. But now I’m on the road and I’m going to go to lunch. You can see at the bottom of the mobile app we have a little camera. I’m going to pull up the camera, I’m going to take a picture of a receipt. There are a few ways that we can get expenses into TravelBank. One is through taking a picture. One is through forwarding them. You can forward them from your email at receipts@travelbank.com.
Dan
Lastly, you can just upload them. I’m going to take this picture, my Safeway receipt. Like I said, the more that you use the site, the more it’s going to remember categories and things like that. Let’s get out of the mobile experience. You can see this was in real time. I just took this picture. It already said Safeway, it already came up with the date and everything. So we’re eliminating clicks now if I continue to wait, oh, see that it already pulled up the meal categories. It has meals in here already because I’ve used this receipt in the past. But let’s just say I wanted to change this to per diem or something along those lines. I can, we also have allocations set up, but I don’t need to allocate this so I’ll just remove it. But really what allocations is, is I can allocate this between departments, between categories if I wanted to.
Dan
We’ll say no, no allocations, general expenses. If I had a project, I can also build this to a customer. So we’ll save this expense. Expense is saved. So very simple. I have a mileage expense in here. We use Google Maps for that. I can add my recurrent expense, which is my AT&T bill. You can do a manual expense and mileage expense, a repeat expense like my AT&T bill, and then any chargebacks or refunds, you can actually do a refund as well. I did talk about card transactions. The card transactions are also coming into the site. And so if a traveler has taken a picture already and they already have a receipt, when these card transactions actually come in, they automatically pair. They pair so that the travelers can reconcile their credit card. But let’s just say there’s one that has it, and I’m just going to use this as an example. I can pair an expense, it makes it very simple. I can come in here, let’s just say I’m going to pair it with Safeway. That expense would be paired and then it would show that that this is been taken care of and you can see your transaction history as well. So I’ve done all my expenses. It’s the end of the month. I’m going to submit this expense. I’ll just say this is for October
Dan
And I’m going to submit that. And now this will go to Josh. This will also go to me and I’ll have a PDF copy of that.
Josh
We are absolutely here to help you. There’s a lot of information. Let us just start by having a conversation with you. Our approach is, is highly consultative. So we promise to do no selling. We simply just want to gain a better understanding of what you’re looking to accomplish in 2023. And perhaps there’s some ways that we can help you both on the travel expense or perhaps both travel and expense, um programs. As you look to roll out your 2023 plan. You can scan this a barcode and by scanning this barcode, you’ll just be taken to a simple landing page at landing page, which just collects some of your basic information. And that will allow us to schedule a time with you to meet with one of our travel experts.
Kayla
Thank you, Josh. Thank you Dan. We love seeing TravelBank and how it can simplify some things for our clients here at US Bank and we’re excited about our continued opportunity and partnership.