An approval process is a powerful tool for visibility and control over your travel spending. However, to make the approval process successful, you will need some admin resources to review and act on incoming approval requests. At the same time, it also causes delays in receiving the travel itinerary to the travelers. So we recommend our customers strike a balance between having cost controls and providing a great booking experience for travelers.
You do not necessarily require an approval process for all your travelers. For example, your executive team would not need an approval process if they have a different budget than the regular travel budget, or they could just be empowered to make their own travel decisions based on business needs. So if you are setting a policy for such a group of people, you can choose to turn off the approval process for them. They will continue to see within & out-of-policy flags as per the price or class rules applied to their policy.
This is the most commonly chosen option by our customers. It allows employees to complete their travel bookings on their own as long as they are within policy. It will trigger the approval process only if the option is flagged out-of-policy. This configuration allows admins to have visibility when any out-of-policy options need to be booked, and also gives freedom to travelers to manage their own travel as long as they abide by the company policy.
In some exceptional circumstances, you may choose to set up an approval process for all travel bookings either to control costs or to have visibility into what itinerary is being booked by the travelers. For example, if you have external contractors/ consultants traveling for a certain project on a tight budget and you want to make sure you don’t overrun the budget; or if you are organizing a group event and you want to make sure all the attendees arrive or depart at a certain time to manage ground transportation.