I know you all have probably been on TravelBank before or maybe this is your first time using the travel platform, but just a little walkthrough of our platform. So one of our main focuses is of course going to be optimizing costs for you. So by using TravelBank travel, you’ll gain access to negotiated rates, and that includes the savings that are typically reserved for larger corporations. And then you can also incentivize your travelers or be incentivized as a traveler through our rewards program.

The travel platform really helps you maximize your productivity. By building, you’ll have your travel policies rate into TravelBank, automated approval flows to reduce headaches and keep your employees within policy. But especially as a traveler yourself, you’ll know exactly what your policy is so that you don’t have to go back to your manager and ask questions. And just to improve travel experience, I think we’ve all probably had some nightmare travel experiences out there. So with our dedicated team of travel agents, they’re available around the clock for you for any travel issues that might arise. So they’re for your flight, your hotel, your car. We’ll talk about them as we go through this presentation, but definitely that will improve your travel experience by having access to our agents.

Some of the features that we will talk about today and really want to make sure that you all are using is our search filters, the specialty rates that you’ll have access to, booking your preferred seats for flights, doing in-app modifications for your flights, how you can earn loyalty points. Of course that’s a big one for all of you road warriors out there. And then for those that are booking on behalf of somebody else, what that delegate role can really help you do so you can book for that other person seamlessly.

So let’s go ahead and I am going to jump right into TravelBank and we will walk through the platform together. All right. So once you are in TravelBank, to book travel, you’ll go into this travel tab on the left-hand side. We will start with flights. So we can say if we’re going from Atlanta to New York, cities like New York, Chicago, the ones that have multiple airports, if you want to see all of them, you’ll see this all airport selection or you can just select specific ones. We will take a look at each one of those today.

We will select our travel dates, so maybe we’re heading a little bit further into February. If you are booking one way or multi-city, that can always be selected up at the top right here. One thing to note here is we will store your flight credits as well for any trips that were booked and canceled within TravelBank. So if you were to have a flight credit here, it would show you how many you have. Just note if you canceled the flight yesterday, it can take up to 24 hours to update here. And just the biggest thing to note here is maybe you’re new to TravelBank, you had a credit on say Delta prior to coming TravelBank, that won’t be reflected in here. But moving forward, any trips that you do get that credit for that were booked through TravelBank, those will be reflected directly within the app here. So just making sure you’re using those first before starting to pay out of pocket. So we want to highlight that right at the beginning.

We’ll go ahead and we can search for this flight. Just note that each company does differ a little bit within their travel policy as well. So you’re always going to know how your policies calculated. Up here we can see that our company policy here, it’s giving me my price. And if I click on this little icon, it’ll tell me exactly how that price is being calculated. And then maybe you have some rules around when you need a book buy. So just telling that me that I need a book within 14 days in advance to fall within policy.

We have a few filters up at the top here, so you can select by time, number of stops, if you have a specific airline that you prefer. And then we talked about the airports, but maybe we don’t want to see all three of the New York airports and we just want to see JFK LaGuardia. We can always just select those two. But we’ll keep all of those in there. And then if there’s any specific amenities that are going to be important to you.

Since each airline does have… They all have different names for their class of service, you have basic economy, you have economy plus, whatever that looks like, we go off the star rating so it keeps everything aligned so you’ll see exactly what three stars is going to mean for you, four stars, just so you can search and really compare the different airlines based on what they’re offering. Our default search here will be by lowest price, but of course shortest duration is typically one of the more popular ones. But if you need to go off departure dates, you can as well.

We will go ahead and select this Delta flight leaving at 12:50. Once you see more options down here, what that’s indicating is it’s going to pull up if you need a book refundable, so you’ll be able to select refundable or you can just stay in the normal main cabin. And then our flight details will show us everything we need to know about the flight. So if there’s a layover, we would know that information, if it’s non-refundable, and then what the policies and rules are as well as the baggage. But we’ll go ahead and we’ll just stay in main cabin here.

Same thing once we’re selecting our return trip, it will show us our main cabin. Again, see all of our flight details. Let’s say we want to leave at 2:36. We’ll see how far this is outside of policy as well. And then once we select our flight, this is the page that you want to spend a little bit of time on just to make sure that you have all the right information. Of course, noticing if it’s refundable or non-refundable. You’ll see exactly what the price breakdown is and how far over budget you are. If you are over budget, it will just request approval from your manager to book the flight. So if it does need to go for approval, we just won’t be able to select our seat at this time just because we need to actually… We wait to ticket it until the flight is fully booked. So it has to go through that approval before we can book it. So if this did not go through approval, we’d be able to select our seat right here.

If you are booking for somebody else, one of the ways you can do it… Or first if you’re booking for yourself, you would select your traveler profile here. Or if you need a book for somebody else, you can add a new traveler, put in all their information, their loyalty program number, and this will be stored directly in your profile. You can decide who to share your booking with. So if you want to send it maybe to a colleague that might be traveling with you, a manager that would be curious of your exact details, anything of the sort, you can put in an additional email here and you can choose to send them just the confirmation or confirmation and receipt.

You also have your payment method. So every company is a little bit different with how they require you to pay for your flight. So if you have questions directly on how to pay, just make sure you check with your manager. This can be either on a personal card, they might want you to submit for reimbursement. Or they might have a company card stored for you just to book your flight directly on that card. If that’s the case, that card is going to populate directly in here. You’ll see those last four digits and be able to book your flight to that card. If you do have to add in your own payment method, you can either add that under your profile under My account. Or we can just add it here, put in all your details and it will save.

Another thing that’s a little bit dependent on your company as well is if they want to get additional booking details. So that would populate at the very bottom here. So if you need to put in say a job number, say if it’s billable or non-billable, you’ll see if it’s optional or required. So just making sure that you put in all that information.

Once we have all of our details in here, we can go ahead and request our flight approval. And this will just, like I said, go over to my manager, say, “Hey, Kate booked this flight $175 over budget. They could approve it or not.” If your flight is completely within policy or if you don’t have any approval rules set up within your company, then you would just book this flight right away. It would go straight to ticketing.

Since this is a demo site, I’m going to just jump over to the hotels instead of sending over that approval. So with the hotels, as you can see, it’s going to populate our same destination and it’s going to populate our travel dates too. That’s one of the really nice things about booking directly on TravelBank, having all your flights, hotels and cars in one, so we can just go ahead and search for our hotel.

A couple things with the hotels too, because there is a lot to cover here. We can look at this in either a list view or we can look at a map view. I personally like to look at the map views, especially when I’m traveling to a city if I know the neighborhood a little bit better, so completely up to you. We have similar filters up at the top here that we saw on the flight side. So you can go by price, you can show only within your company’s budget, star rating, guest rating. So if you want to know exactly what other people are saying about it.

Maybe you’re specific to a hotel brand. I know I typically travel Hilton just to get all my points. So if I can see all of Hilton brands or if there’s specific ones that I really like, I can just look at. If I just want to see doubletrees to get the cookies at check-in, I can do that. And then amenities as well. This can definitely be very important for travel, especially maybe you’re traveling for a little while and you want to make sure that there’s laundry services for you.

Since I just put in New York in general, of course that’s a very big distance. So if you do put in maybe an exact address or something a little bit closer and then we can go ahead and narrow this down if we need to. Once you use the filters if you want, we will see all of the hotels. We will once again see exactly how our travel policy is being calculated. If you see your company’s negotiated rate, this account that we’re in right now is called Demo Land. So you might see your company name instead. What that means is your company has a negotiator rate a partnership with this hotel. Those are going to populate up at the top for you just because your company is going to prefer for you to stay there. That way they’ll continue to get the hotel nights that they’ve agreed upon with the property and they’ve just negotiated some really great rates for you. So that’s what that will mean.

But if we scroll down and say we want to stay at the Hyatt House, a couple really, really important things to look at here. So you can filter by rate types. We have two rate types which are pay at hotel or pay now. Exactly as it sounds. So we’re either going to be paying at the hotel at the time of check-in, we’ll put a card down. Or we can pay now, it will get charged to the card immediately. With rewards and loyalty, if you are a road warrior, you want to make sure that you’re getting your hotel loyalty eligible points, selecting this here. And then the third very important filter is going to be cancellation policy. So if you don’t know for sure your trip is going to take place, we’re going to want to book refundable. Otherwise, we will see refundable and non-refundable.

TravelBank is extremely fortunate to get rates for hotels to a couple different places. So I personally have worked at other travel management companies where we only had hotel rates directly from the hotel. People are reaching out all the time saying, “Hey, why can’t I get this really great rate that I’m seeing on Expedia?” And then on the flip side, there’s other travel management companies out there where they’re only getting say Expedia rates and people are wondering, “Hey, why can’t I get these rates that I’m seeing directly with the hotel?” So with TravelBank, we’re getting both of those.

With that, it means that these filters are very, very crucial for you to look at and we always want to make sure that you know exactly what you’re getting with that rate. So this one is going to be refundable. We’re paying at the hotel, so I would be required to put a card down at check-in. I am getting my hotel loyalty points. And then I’m just getting my company rate here. There will be some other ones here. As you can see, hotel loyalty points are not an option, but the trade-off typically is it is a little bit cheaper.

So we’re seeing one king studio suite, $186, versus the one king bed 1 95. So we really, by having rates from Expedia and the hotels direct, it’s making sure that there’s something for everybody here. So price is going to be the most important. Maybe the trade-off is going to be you’re not going to get your hotel loyalty points. So there’s definitely benefits in having both types of those rates, but just make sure that you know exactly what you’re booking and those three filters are going to be your best friend here. Just making sure you’re getting exactly what you need.

We will go ahead and say we want this queen bed. You’re not positive we’re going to the trip. We want refundable and we would be paying at the hotel. Excuse me. All of that information is going to populate as we review our itinerary. This is very similar to what we saw on the flights page of course, breaking down if it’s refundable or not because I’d be booking for myself, grab my traveler information.

The payment method is one thing to also keep in mind when you’re booking hotels. Since this is a pay at the hotel property, my payment method here is only going to hold the hotel for me. I’m still going to be required to put a card down at check-in to pay for it. If you do not have a company card and you use a card at check-in, you’ll want to of course talk to your company directly, but most likely be submitting for reimbursement. Or if you have your own company card, you can put that card down at check-in, just check with your manager of exactly how they want you paying for your hotels. But just note, if you are selecting pay at hotel, you will be required to have a card at check-in. If you’re paying now, you can use your card on file here to pay for it.

Just because our hotel here is refundable, we do still need to cancel within this one’s a 24-hour period. So every hotel is a little bit different. Sometimes you need to cancel within 24 hours, sometimes 48 hours before check-in. So just because refundable, just make sure that you are seeing all these special instructions at the bottom here. And then of course just making sure that you have your additional booking details if needed.

And then one quick note too, if you are paying for the hotel at the time of booking, here, if they do ask for a card at check-in, that will just be for incidentals. So if you do any room service or charge a bottle of water to your room, you would just have to put a card down and check in strictly for incidentals. We won’t reserve this hotel today.

And then we’ll move over to cars. Like I said, I know that it’s definitely Uber, Lyft, taxis tend to be very popular, but if you are going to be booking a car, we can do that directly in TravelBank. So selecting our location. You can have a different location for drop off and pick up. One thing to notice sometimes that is a little bit more expensive, so if you can keep the drop-off and pick up at the same location, saves you a little bit of money there. Select our dates and our times and then we can search for our cars here.

Very, very similar filters to what we saw on the flights and hotels. So if we want to see only airport or non-airport pickups, distance from our pickup point. If your company say has a negotiated rate with enterprise and we only want to see the enterprise cars here, we can select our agency, select our car type, so maybe we’re traveling with a couple people and we need a van or an SUV. Or in the flip side you can also just do car capacity as well, so if you need something a little bit bigger. And then of course the price range here.

If your company does have a negotiated rate with say, we’ll use Enterprise as an example here, your admins will have loaded that in your company settings. The company rates can vary a little bit. Sometimes they are including your insurance. So I would check with your travel team just to see if they want you to be waiving insurance when you’re picking up the car just to make sure you’re not getting those extra costs if it’s already within your contract or if your company has a policy around that. Sometimes you can get upgraded cars from the company agreement. There’s a lot of different things in there. So just making sure you understand, “Hey, do we have a negotiated rate with any car rental companies? If so, what one?” Just so you are getting those perks and making sure that you are getting the insurance, like I mentioned, that could be added into it.

One of the biggest things to know about the cars here is payment is not required at this time and it will be processed at the time of the vehicle pickup. We are not even asking you as you can see for a payment method here at the time of booking a car because you will have to put a card down when you pick up this car. Once again, if your company does have say a negotiator rate with Enterprise, they might have direct bill set up. So your car costs will just go directly to the company direct bill. Just another thing to ask your company about directly though. But if not, just note you will have to put that card down at check-in and pay for it. When you do pick up that car. You can not pay for the car ahead of time unless you have that direct bill. So that’s why you won’t even see that payment method here.

But we’ll go ahead. We can reserve this car and we would be good to go. Once we land, go pick up our car, the Jersey City location is the one that we selected and then we are on our way. Okay, excuse me. All of this, so booking your flights, your hotels, your cars can also be done on our mobile app. So I highly recommend that you go in there and download our app for Android or iOS. And you can also chat with our agents directly on the app and you can chat with them just by clicking this chat button. You would select travel. And then we always want to know exactly what type of travel you’re doing. So are you on the road right now?

If so, you’ll be put in that first urgent queue. We know that if you’re currently at the airport, it’s very urgent to talk to our agents. If you’re traveling about two weeks out, we’ll get back to you on exactly what your question is, what you need. But just so you know that the people that are currently on the road will get that top priority. Of course we would all want that when we’re out on the road so we can totally understand that. You can also call them at this 866 number. If you have your cell phone right next to you, I recommend just saving this number directly into your phone too so you can call them at any point. You don’t have to look it up. But like I said, you can chat with them on the desktop version as well as on the mobile app.

And then on our dashboard here, you will see any of your travel bookings too. So you can view past bookings. I don’t have any rate here, but you’d be able to view your upcoming bookings, your past bookings, and anything that might be pending approval. So once again, a really great thing about TravelBank is all your flights, hotels and cars are exactly in one place.

If you do need to cancel or modify a flight, you can of course chat in with our travel team. They will be able to assist you with that. But you can also see on this screen here, so I’m just in our support help desk here, we have a ton of articles. So we covered something on the call today that you’re like, “Oh, I want to go back. I don’t remember exactly what was said,” you can search for an article here. But if you do need to modify anything, this is what you’re going to see. You’ll see an upcoming trip, you’ll see a modify button and you’ll see a cancel button as well. So we can do that directly in app and then you’ll be prompted, we can select a new flight here.

And then if you are going to modify from the mobile app as well, you’ll see a similar button for your upcoming pending and past trips. And then on the mobile app right now, if we click modify, it will just break those into a chat here. So the best way to do it at this time, it would just be on the desktop app, but we will be getting that over to mobile as well.

Let me go ahead. I know we have a few questions that have been popping up as well. Let me just share one more thing here and then we can get into those questions. If you are booking travel on behalf of somebody else as a delegate, you’ll go into my account. This is also where all your traveler information will be stored, any loyalty programs, so your flights, hotels, cars. And then you can see any flight credits here as well. Under payment methods is where you’ll see any cards that you have access to book on. If you do need to add in your own card, click add and add in that new payment method. And then this can be used when you are booking. To book on behalf of somebody else as a delegate, we’ll click switch account. You can see who you can perform tasks for. You can also see if anybody is assigned to you to be able to do tasks on your behalf, but we will log in to Cassie’s account.

What this does is it logs us in as Cassie so we can see exactly what she does. So we can go under travel. We’ll book in the same exact way that you would if you were on your own profile. The difference is… We’ll select a flight location, some dates. The difference doing it this way versus booking directly on your own account and adding in their information, all of their bookings are going to be directly on their profile since you are booking exactly like you were them. So we can select some flights for Cassie. And then if she had her traveler profile information in there, it would all be populated here for us and we’d be able to request flight approval for this. And you’ll always be able to see in the top who you’re logged in as.

So once you complete this booking for her, we can click switch back and it’ll automatically just bring us back to our own account. So this will be used if you do have delegate access to be able to book on behalf of somebody else as a delegate versus how we saw earlier where you can book just for them in your own profile.

So we talked a little bit about our live agent support. So they are 24/7. Chat with them on desktop, mobile. Once again, here is the phone number. And this is the email for them as well, so reservations@travelbank.com. Once again, you might want to screenshot this and save it, but our travel agents are 24/7. They are certified agents, so they will be able to help you with anything that you need.

All right. I do see we have a few questions in here. So one, “I just booked a flight on Delta and it did not offer the option of prepaying baggage. I believe I have to do it on the Delta website within 24 hours of the flight. Feedback appreciated in case I’ve missed something.”

Yep. So right now the baggage would be done either once you get to the airport. Or you could do it, say you have your Delta number associated with the booking, you could do it in the Delta app. We just can’t pay for baggage on the TravelBank website at this time. So you did not miss anything. You’re doing it exactly right.

“Is there a way to get an idea of the fees for changes of itineraries on flights? Sometimes customers cancel appointments and changes are required. Maybe buying a more flexible rate is better at the end of the day. How do we make that decision?”

That is a very, very good question and definitely something that a lot of our clients think about. A lot of travel changed when the pandemic hit, so a lot of airlines started waiving that $200 change fee. In these instances, I would not recommend booking basic economy. Some companies don’t even have basic economy turned on their TravelBank sites. So if you don’t see that, no worries. That was a decision by your company. But with a basic economy for example, you wouldn’t be able to change that flight. You would just kind of be out that flight cost.

So making sure that if you’re not booking your refundable trip, at least booking main cabin or higher, that way you have a little bit more flexibility. So if you do make a cancellation, you’ll get that travel credit. So just making sure that you’re looking at all of those rules and regulations based on what the booking is. But my biggest suggestion and what we always tell our clients is definitely don’t suggest basic economy for that reason. And just making sure that you are utilizing your travel credits. Since we store them directly in TravelBank for you, you’ll always know when you have one available too. So even if your client cancels, you can use that credit for your next trip when you’re booking to maybe go visit that client or a different one.

“For hotel bookings, how can I filter by property name or by address?”

Yeah, that’s a great question. Let me just jump back into the platform because that will be a little bit easier to walk through here. So back on our hotels here, say we’re going to the Hyatt Chicago on Magnificent Mile, so we can just type in that property name directly or we could just type it at address as well. So you don’t have to just put in a city or a general location like that. You can definitely make it a tighter search there either by that property name or like I said by that address. So it’s coming up right here at the top, the Hyatt Magnificent Mile for us. And that’s where this distance will really come in handy too. So if you are just putting in a address in and you only want to stay within a mile, half a mile of that, I would recommend just using this and then you’ll be able to see everything close by. But yeah, just putting it right in that search destination, you can put in the address or the property name.

“For car rentals, bookings here do not include insurance. Can insurance be added booking through TravelBank?”

Another very good question. So the insurance would be included like I said, if your company maybe has a negotiated rate with Enterprise, Avis, whatever that might look like and if the insurance is included in what they’ve negotiated with the vendor. We can not add the car insurance directly through TravelBank. So you could, once you get to pick up the car, that’s something that you can add in directly when you’re picking it up. They’ll ask you if you want to start adding in all those extra things. So checking that out.

Another thing that is always worth checking too is sometimes your personal car insurance too includes you for driving rental cars. It’s always worth checking that out and just seeing maybe you even have a company policy that would cover for insurance. Car insurance can be a little bit tricky because we do have a couple different avenues like adding it in with the time of pickup or if you’re already covered by your company. So just I would look at each one of those aspects and see if you’re already covered in another way for rental cars.

And then, “Do the upgraded seats show up at the seat selector for flights?”

So when you are selecting your flights, let’s go ahead and grab a flight in here, so you will see based on when I’m selecting main cabin, I will be able to go ahead and see all of the main cabin seats available. If I’m selecting a Comfort Plus, then it’s going to show me that upgraded seats, the Comfort Plus upgraded seats directly in the seat map. So that will just be dependent on exactly what cabin you’re going to be choosing from, of what seats you’ll be seeing.

So we definitely have time for some more questions too. We had a lot of really, really great questions, so thank you all for participating in those. I will stay on for a little bit longer if there are more questions that do pop up. But like I said, if you do have some questions, you can always email success@travelbank.com. That goes to myself and my team. If you need support, you could go to our support.travelbank.com website and that’s where you can start searching for different articles that you might have questions about, or you can email support@travelbank.com. Our support team is here to really help with any functionality questions if you run into any challenges. And then if you have any questions about our product updates, you can go to travelbank.com/whats-new. As we do our monthly releases, we put all of this information directly into that site. That way, you know exactly what’s changed. If you look at our December updates on that site, it’s showing some changes that we did too in that modifications, pushing it out to all different airlines. So it’s a really great way to keep a pulse on exactly what we’re doing.

And then of course, I want to highlight again, since we’re looking at travel, I’ll leave this screen up just to make sure you have that information that you would need if you do need to contact them.

Like I said, I will hang out here for a few more minutes if any other questions come up. But otherwise, thank you all so much for joining us today for our Customer Success Office Hours and learning a little bit more about travel.