Policies are a bundled set of restrictions & permissions that allow you to define how your travellers can search & book trips, but also how they travel and how much they spend. A good travel policy should consider both the cost and well-being of the traveller. Only the super admin is allowed to set up policies in your organization.
1. Getting started
Setting up a policy for your team members is fairly straightforward once the required setup is clear (see below to learn more). Once ready, make sure to,
- Create at least 1 group, invite users, and add managers to the group. Without managers, no one can approve any booking requests.
- Set up your policy in a way that suits your company workflow
- Assign users or groups to the policy.
That's it! Your travellers are now ready to start booking flights or hotels. If a policy is assigned to the group that a traveller is in, they will automatically follow that policy when booking.
2. Flight policies
To create or change a policy to go Manage -> Policies & Rules and hit "add" or click on an existing policy. There are two types of policies that you can set up. A policy for flight bookings and for accommodations.
When you create a flight policy you'll have few options to select from. Some of them impact how flights are booked (approval flow), and others are filters that prevent travellers from bookings specific flights.
- All flights require approval: When enabled, travellers can only request for a flight to be booked (and an approval request goes to the manager). Once the manager approves, the booking will be charged and the booking processed. Learn more about the approval workflow here
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Total flight budget: Customize your approval workflow based on a specific budget range. For example, if your travellers should book flights under $300, but never over $5000 you can set it up like this
In this example:
- Flights below $310 will be considered "in budget" and are immediately paid and booked whenever a traveller selects it.
- Flights between $310 and $5000 will require approval before they can be booked.
- Flights above $5000 will be completely hidden from search
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Booking window: Travellers must book at least X days before departure. If they book their flight after that, the booking will go through approval first.
Example: You've set a 5 day advanced booking threshold and Amy booked a flight on Monday 2 June, with a departure date on 4 June -> An approval request is going to the manager before the booking actually happens.
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Cabin class: Set which cabin class is automatically approved, requires approval, or should be hidden from search completely (Economy, Premium Economy, Business, First class)
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Exclude airline: Exclude specific airlines from showing up in your travellers search results.
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Flight exceptions: Add exceptions to your generic policy based on flight duration, trip type (eg international), route.
Exceptions are often used to allow long-haul or international bookings to have less restrictions (e.g. business class is allowed after 6+ hours travel time). Note that exceptions can only be created if the main policy is NOT "All Flights/Hotels Requires Approval".Example: Whenever a flight is more than 8 hours and international and from Singapore to Amsterdam, the maximum allowed cabin class is First Class and the requiring approval budget is increased to $500, and flights over $10,000 will be hidden from search.
3. Accommodation policies
Accommodation policies are similar to flight policies. The only difference is that you don't have airline-specific filters but instead you'll have hotel star ratings available.
- All accommodation require approval: Similar to flights
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Per night budget: Similar to flights, except that the budgets is based on a room right per night.
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Booking window: Similar to flights
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Booking duration: Set a max. duration for accommodations that can be booked without approval. For example you could decide that any booking longer than 5 days have to be approved.
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Accommodation type: Restrict of hide certain accommodation types such as holiday homes, apartments and guest houses.
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Nights of the week: Enforce approval if a booking falls on a specific day of the week. Great if you want to encourage people to avoid booking on Saturdays and Sundays for example.
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Review score: Restrict or hide certain accommodations with lower review scores. Always recommended to ensure certain quality standards.
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Hotel star ratings: Similar to review scores, but then based on hotel star ratings. Note that star ratings are quite subjective and we don't typically recommend using them.
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Accommodation exceptions: Similar to flights, but hotel exceptions are largely based on location and hotel ratings.
Train policies
With trains, you can adjust the budgets and approvals similar with flight and hotel policies. Adjusting the budget will then change what seat class can the traveller choose during booking.
- All accommodation require approval: Similar to flights & accommodation
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Total train budget: Similar to flights & accommodation, but based the total fare price.
- Seat class: Similar to cabin class for flights.
4. Assigning policies to travellers and groups
By default, policies won't affect any users until they are assigned to them. You can decide to assign policies to individual users or assign them to entire groups.
Do note that a user can only be part of 1 policy so if a user is part of a group that is already assigned to a policy, this user can't be assigned to another policy anymore.
Check out this video below for a quick run-through on how to assign a policy to you.