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Getting Your Business Travel Approvals Right

Is your business travel approval process due an update?

6 min
Posted: 04 October 2019
Corporate-travel-managers-considering-approvals.jpg

By Natasha Samuel, senior product marketing manager and Kriti Agarwal, senior product manager

In the past, business travel policies were strict, rule-focused, and allowed little flexibility. Thankfully these days travel policies are built around traveller happiness, with a better understanding of the relationship between traveller satisfaction, productivity, and loyalty.

It begs the question: Is the approval for business travel process due an update too? Data from Egencia shows that an average of 19 percent of bookings go for approval. And of those bookings, only 1 percent are rejected by the approver. The reality is that in most circumstances, the approver is already aware of planned travel and is very unlikely to reject a request.

For many companies, a formal approval process is still necessary. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be as enlightened and traveller-centric as modern travel policy.

We’ve put together some real-life client examples — alongside some Egencia data — to help you refine your approach to business travel approvals.

  1. Understand the needs of your company and your people first

There are many reasons for companies to have approval processes. With reasons ranging from budgetary approval and project management to audit purposes and client-related trips (that you will charge back later).

In our experience of implementing, and talking to, new clients, the most common reason cited for an approval process is ‘for visibility.’ On closer examination, they simply mean giving the line manager visibility of their employee’s trip — but what else needs consideration?

We’ve narrowed down the most important needs of an approval process for travellers, approvers, and those who oversee travel programmes.

  • Travellers want a clear, automated approval process regardless of how they book (online, via an app or with a Travel consultant). It shouldn’t be one way for an app booking and another if they contact a Travel consultant.
  • Approvers want to make informed decisions to approve or reject trips. Give them the information they need up front to make an informed choice.
  • Those managing day-to-day travel want efficient, flexible, and self-service tools so they can adjust approval processes immediately when they need to.
  1. Assess the impact

Understand who and where your approvers are and how they approve travel today. This will give you a clear indication of the change management needs before you roll out a new process or travel management company (TMC).

  1. Get a second, neutral opinion

We can’t overstate the importance of working with your TMC to understand the available options before you launch an approval process. Their experience and knowledge can help ensure that your process is supported in a way that doesn’t negatively impact your employees.

Here are a couple of real-life examples we were personally involved with, where Egencia’s input led to two very different outcomes.

  • Company A wanted to have all approval requests, for all travellers, sent to one central mailbox. The mailbox was then going to be overseen by an Executive Assistant who wouldn’t take any action on the requests.

Verdict: If there’s no one looking at the approval request, what’s the point? A scare tactic for travellers isn’t going to make them more compliant to your company’s policy. The client didn’t proceed with having an approval process and instead relies on a strong policy, with in-built reporting, to manage any non-compliance.

  • Company B wanted to have three levels of approval for over 3,000 travellers around the world. An additional complication was that in many instances, the approvers (all three of them, per traveller) were based in different countries, on different continents.

Verdict: The advice I gave to this client? Don’t do it. Educating 3,000 travellers and their approvers on the process and balancing that with changing availability and fluctuating prices 24/7/365 was simply impossible.

In this instance, the client did proceed with three levels of approval, and within a week of launching the new approval process, their leadership team turned it off completely. Since then, they have single line-manager approval for trips that don’t comply with the policy, rather than all trips. And they scrapped the three approvals process for each booking.

  1. Understand culture and increase compliance

Often, changes to policy, approval, and the selection of your TMC are decided from one country and mandated to many more. Getting buy-in in all countries will help compliance and reduce the ‘noise’ that you, the person looking after the travel programme, must manage.

  1. First-time approval process and worried about approver responsiveness?

When a company decides to have an approval process for travel, a common concern is that their approvers won’t approve or reject the trip in time.

When travellers book on a travel platform with live availability, there’s always a risk of price changes and a shortage of rooms, so a speedy approval process is imperative. When you add a global context to this, panic really starts to kick in. You may have a traveller based in London with an approver based in Sydney. How do you tackle the time zone challenge, particularly for last-minute bookings?

Don’t panic. Our data shows that approvers respond to their requests quickly: 70 percent of approval requests are actioned within one hour and 90 percent within 24 hours.*

  1. Communicate, educate and inform

Moving to a new process from a low online booking environment, or a business with no automated approval is a challenge. Don’t underestimate the difficulty of changing your culture and behavior. It’s essential to keep everyone informed of the process, and their responsibilities, before you launch a new automated approval process.

  1. Be transparent

Travellers think of approval as something that the TMC enforces. Tell your travellers why there’s an approval process in place and explain what the expected outcomes should be.

  1. Understand what can be done and the limitations of your travel platform

Whether you’re launching approval for travel for the first time, changing TMC, or simply reviewing your business processes, work with your TMC to understand what can be supported.

  1. Automation

In an increasingly automated world, you may want to automate how your travellers’ profiles are managed within your travel management platform. This can be done via a feed to your human resources system. If you intend to automate employee profiles with a HR feed, check that that your employee database can identify which approvers are linked to which travellers.

  1. Keep it simple

Is it necessary to involve more than one approver for each trip? Less than 10 percent of our clients have more than one level of approver in their process.

It’s doubtful that the business travel industry will see trip approvals disappear completely from travel programmes. But as policies become increasingly more relaxed and traveller-centric, we can see that strict, complex approval processes are on the decline.

Business travel powers business growth. And experience has shown us that it’s extremely rare for any company to want to block travel from taking place.

Our advice on launching a business travel approval process? Work closely with the Account manager and Implementation team at your TMC to really assess how the approval process will work once you launch it. Make sure you can clearly define the benefits of a process and consider if it improves your business output and traveller satisfaction overall.

*Based on Egencia customer data - trip approvals for air, hotel, car and rail transactions in 2018

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