Recording Transcript:

For the company, having travel policies in a place allows you to optimize savings and control costs, so the policies will help to control expenses by setting limits on airfare, accommodation and other expenses. This ensures that your employees adhere to budget constraints and don’t overspend.

Also, risk management. Travel policies will help outline safety protocols and emergency procedures, reducing your company’s liability and increasing overall duty of care. Travel policies also ensure employees comply with legal and regulatory requirements related to travel.

Lastly, efficiency. Formalizing travel procedures and approvals streamlines the overall booking process, saving time and resources for both travelers and admins.

So how does TravelBank help you achieve these outcomes? With TravelBank, admins can set dynamic budgets for travelers as well as define fare types, hotel class, and preferred vendors to book. This helps to narrow the travel choices and keep costs down.

Bookings made through TravelBank aid and duty of care giving admins visibility into where employees are booking travel and the locations of active travelers. This gives admins the insight they need to better prepare their travelers for their trip and help them if issues arise. All bookings are also visible to our travel support team, so they can provide immediate assistance to travelers in the event of extensions, delays, cancellations, or missed flights.

And lastly, because admins can build multiple policies right into the TravelBank platform, the travel policy is easily communicated to the employee throughout the booking process. Travelers will know what’s in or out of policy, reducing questions and making it easier to stay within policy. On the admin and manager side, automated approval flows help increase policy adherence without extra effort and reduce the headaches associated with out-of-policy violations. So overall, it’s a more efficient experience and a win-win for both admins and travelers. We will take a deeper look at the specific features around these three pillars later on in the presentation.

Now to take a look at a couple travel policy best practices. One, we want to determine the policies. In some cases, companies will need multiple policies. For example, your executive team may have a more flexible policy than your sales organization. When beginning to create your overall policy, you must first identify any groups of travelers with specific needs. Specify how each group should be allowed to book flights and accommodations and what their approval requirements are.

Always consider the traveler. As we know, traveler is extremely personable. So change management is always best handled when you consider the team’s needs, preferences and concerns to create a policy that is fair and practical. This will lead to greater satisfaction and adoption to booking on the platform.

So one way that you can do that is set reasonable budget limits. So one way to focus on the travel, you can consider adding additional budget flexibility.

Policy customization. If your company has certain special requirements such as VIP travelers, communicate this to your implementation specialist or customer success manager. Some customized requests can be added to the GDS system that our agents use when booking so they’re familiar with these regulations.

Always communicate your policies. Provide your team the complete travel policy for their review, and regularly communicate updates to the travel policy and provide training or resources to ensure that employees understand their obligations and how to comply with the policy. They should understand when bookings will require authorization approvals by appropriate managers. And also ensure that your team understands the risk of non-compliance.

Lastly, monitoring and adjustment. We want to continue to monitor travel-related metrics. You can do this in Core Insights or Premium Insights by evaluating how much you’re spending on airfare and based on booking date, average daily hotel rates for your top cities. Premium Insights will allow you to tap into approval information as well, so you can see if any travel approvers should be updated for a quicker booking time. In addition to reporting, gather feedback from your travelers and periodically review and update the policy to address any issues or changing circumstances. Your Customer Success Manager can work with you to ensure your policy is efficient for your changing needs as a business. And Premium Insights will also give you a deeper insight into your policy compliance.

When you first begin to develop or refresh your travel policy, you want to consider firstly the fare type and hotel class. By selecting a fare type and hotel class that is acceptable for your team, TravelBank will automatically create a budget built around that.

When budget flexibility is enabled, travelers are given a percentage or dollar amount flexibility with their budget to be considered in policy. This is great for last minute bookings and certain peak times when your typical policy might be hard to comply with.

Advanced booking requirements. This will help maximize potential cost savings. It’s pretty common for flight prices to increase the closer that you get to departure. So say if you opt for a 14-day window around your booking, that may help to drive cost down.

If travelers have a certain budget, they must stay within. You can define a hard cap. Anything outside of this number will be considered out of policy. When booking, travelers will see if any flights or hotels or out of policy, by the “out of policy” label. They can still continue to book this, it will just trigger the approval process that is in place.

So once you do have your policy set up, you can then define how it should be approved. We have open, strict and moderate approvals. If you have an open approval in peak place, the manager will simply be notified a booking was made and no approval will be required. A traveler will be made aware of their booking is outside of policy when they book outside the parameters, but they will not be stopped as we just mentioned.

Now, moderate approvals. This is going to require your manager approval for out of policy bookings only. And then we do have those strict approvals. So that’s going to require approval on all bookings regardless of compliance.

In addition to approvals, which are sent via email, and then you do have an in-app notification, there’s also just notifications that you can set up, either in addition or instead of approvals. This is a notification that’s also sent in an email to the travel’s manager alerting them that the trip has been booked. The biggest difference though is no action is needed on their end. It’s just a notification. The general best practice is to have notifications turned on for all bookings and approvals limited. This will help create a pleasant experience for the traveler. When the approval sits for a while, the price can change, which may require the traveler to rebook the trip.

So let’s go over some use cases for additional policies. Firstly, you’ll always have the default policy. This is super important because if for some reason you’re adding new users and you forget to specify what policy they belong to, they’ll just always go to this default policy that’s in place. But creating additional travel policies will allow you to tailor the guidelines to the specific needs and expectations of each group. So one example is candidates. You can provide stricter guidelines for travel expenses and accommodations for those who may only need temporary access to TravelBank. This could include candidates you’re interviewing for your company, contractors who’ve been hired temporarily or other guests that are visiting, traveling with your team. By creating a candidate policy with strict approval, you’re ensuring that travel for these guests will not be booked without that approval.

Company events. This can be used for kickoffs, holiday parties, and other team gatherings when coordinating travel for large groups. So say you have a hard cap for these events where you’re looking to stay within a certain amount for their airfare, you can define that through a policy. And lastly, we have executive travel. This is pretty common. A lot of times it’s used to grant executive or C-suite travelers greater freedom or less restrictive policies. So you might want to assign them to a policy that’s completely open so they’re ever triggering those approvals.

Okay. I’m going to stop my screen share for just a second and then we will go into the TravelBank platform and take a look at this together. Okay. So here we are in the TravelBank platform. This is in an admin view. How you will see travel policies is within the Company Settings. Once you’re in Company Settings, you’ll want to click on travel, and we’ll see our policies right here. Before we go into travel policies, one thing I just want to quickly call out since we touched on duty of care, we do have this traveler tracker. This will allow admins to see where their travelers are while they’re on their trip. All active stays flights, and you can download all this information. There’s typically a map that pops up here we just don’t have data in this demo account.

Okay. So moving into travel policies. Here you can see some existing policies. So anything that is existing, you can always go in and edit. But we’ll go ahead and build a new travel policy together. So first, you can set a budget for flights. The budget will be built around these options that you select here. We typically recommend Economy for the fare class, and Nonstop for stops. So we’ll leave that as is. For the sake of this demo, we’ll turn on Advanced Booking Requirements, and we’ll set that one to 14 days. So if anyone would try to book within that 14-day window, that will be considered out of policy.

Here’s where you can add that Hard Cap, in addition to the Budget Flexibility. If you do the budget flexibility, I would say that generally a percentage is a good recommendation, but 10 to 15% is typically what we see. But again, this is up to you and can be adjusted at any time. Here is where you can set those notifications. So again, this is simply a notification that’s emailed to the manager that this booking was made. It’s no response needed from their end. So we’ll set this one to All Bookings. And then the approval, that’s the action item that the manager will need to take. So can we have the open, the moderate, and the strict? We’ll go ahead and make this one a strict approval, which means any booking will trigger that approval.

So once you have your flight policy set up, you can then go into hotels. We have the distance from the search location here. Again, those advanced booking requirements. So I’ll set this one to let’s do seven days for hotels. We have this Hotel Nightly Rate Hard Cap. For this one, let’s say we’ll add a hard cap at, let’s go for 180. And we’ll set that for all bookings as well. Once you have your policy created, you can go ahead and define who’s in that policy. I’ll add myself to this policy. If they are, and currently in another policy, you will see this message here. You can go ahead and save that. And another way that you can manage if you look at your employee directory, you can see everyone’s travel policy that’s in place. So there’s mine that we just updated there, and you will see the drop-down of all the policies within the employee directory here.

Okay. Great. So let’s go ahead and before we look at booking a trip, let’s see what it looks like from the approvers view. So like I said, they’ll receive an email notification when they have a trip to approve, but they’ll also have this in-app notification here. So it looks like I currently have one trip to approve. It’s a flight request. You can click on this. You can view the details. Any comments here. You can either approve it. If you approve that, then the trip will at that point book. And then if there’s any price adjustment, you’ll see it at that time. And then at that point, once it’s booked, your traveler will receive the confirmation email and then you can decline. When we decline here, we’ll need to give a reason and then go ahead and decline it. If you provide that reason there, that will get sent back to the traveler so they know what they will need to go in and change before rebooking. So that’s how the approver side works.

Now let’s look at it from the travel side. So let’s look at booking a hotel. I believe we set it for seven days. So let’s see. And you’ll see that policy here. Yeah. Perfect. So let’s go ahead and look at something that would be out of policy. Okay. So you can see what the budget is here, that cap that we put in place. So everything should be coming up out of policy since we’re booking outside of that window. It looks like this one falls within our policy for price. So let’s go ahead and check this one out. So once you get to the final checkout page here, this is where the traveler can input their information, their payment method, if cost center is required. And if it does require approval, you will see that here. So you’re booking within the seven days. You can click that icon there and that will remind you of your travel policy.

When you click the request to hotel approval here, that’s going to trigger that approval process so your manager will receive that email and that in-app notification. Okay. So that is what it looks like from the traveler view. Let me pause my screen here and we’ll jump back into our presentation. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Your questions can be sent to either the success inbox here or of course we do have our support email. Have a couple of links here for product updates. And as a reminder, we will be sending out this recording in a couple of days. Thanks everyone for joining today. Hope you tune into the next Office Hours.