Automated travel policy

How to automate your travel policy to reduce shadow work

50% of business travelers admit that they don’t always follow their travel policy (and that’s just the ones who were willing to admit it). 

Why? Convenience and price. If their approved travel tool doesn’t offer the flight or hotel options that suit their schedule — or at prices that the traveler finds reasonable — travelers often break policy and book on consumer websites.

The result? You, as the travel manager, have to keep cleaning up the mess that these random bookings create. Chasing context, reconciling data, and answering questions that pull you away from more strategic work.

The easiest solution is an automated travel policy that enforces itself, turning policy from a roadblock into a guardrail. Travelers can move fast without breaking the rules, while you spend less time on the work behind the work and more time improving the travel program.

Here’s how automating travel policies helped these three travel managers

We talk to travel managers and admins all the time. The three biggest problems we hear from them are: 

Sound familiar? In the teams we talked to, automating their travel policy in a consolidated travel booking platform fixed all three of these problems. Here’s how: 

1. Automated travel policies cut down on shadow work by allowing travelers to self-book within policy guidelines. You don’t have to go back and forth on emails with travelers, they can book their own travel through an intuitive tool. Plus, you can automate approvals too, making the approval process direct and streamlined. You don’t have to approve every decision, giving you more time to focus on real work with real impact.

Andrea, an operations manager at Beekeeper, told us that the previous office manager spent 30-40% of her time on travel booking. Now that they automate travel policies with Perk, Andrea only spends about 1.5 hours per week booking travel for the team. 

2. Automated travel policies mean you don’t have to chase compliance — it happens automatically. Employees don’t have to read and apply the policy on their own. Instead, the travel booking will clearly show you which results match your policy. You save time while increasing compliance.

When we talked to Vicki Framsted, the senior finance manager at Fieldin, she said her team had achieved nearly 100% compliance since building their travel policies into their booking platform, Perk. Plus, they’ve drastically reduced admin and approval time. 

3. Finally, with increased compliance, you centralize bookings and travel data, which makes invoicing, expenses, and reporting a snap. You can work seamlessly with finance teams to get them what they need without having to pull together scattered travel data manually.

Olivier, CEO Of Ykone, told us that centralized travel data “has changed [their] life.” Their previous manual, scattered booking processes were time-consuming and made it “a nightmare to keep track of everything.” 

He told us that automated booking and travel policies not only speed up booking processes — it enables them to keep everything in one place. 

Ok, but how does one actually automate their travel policy?

It’s not as hard as it sounds, we promise. And it doesn’t require you to know any fancy automation tricks. All you have to do is find a centralized booking tool that supports policy compliance, which is pretty easy. But implementing any type of change into established protocols can be difficult. Here’s the step-by-step process we recommend to get all the benefits.

1. Determine your travel policy guidelines

Before you set up a tool, make sure the CFO, other travel managers, and other stakeholders are in agreement with your policy. Typically, automatic travel policies cover the following:

• Where to book travel (usually a dedicated corporate booking platform)

• What flight classes are allowed

• How much to spend on a flight for a certain route

• How much to spend on a hotel in a specific city

• What car rental classes are allowed

• The expenses process

Get a head start on creating your own business travel policy. Try our free, comprehensive template today.

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2. Choose a tool travelers will want to use

This is a critically important step. Remember the stat from the introduction? If travelers don’t love using your approved tool, then your automated policy will be completely ineffective. If they don’t think the tool really cuts down their shadow work, they’ll ditch it, leaving the in-app policy behind.

The following criteria isn’t exhaustive — and different stakeholders (travel, finance, operations) may prioritize different things — but here’s what you need in a travel tool if you plan to automate your policy:

• Stellar reviews from travelers (not just travel managers and finance folks)

• The widest possible travel options, including everything you can find online and all the lower cost vendors that employees tend to book with to save money

• High-quality, 24/7 travel support that the traveler won’t want to sacrifice

• A user-friendly interface and mobile app so travelers can actually book and manage their itineraries easily — no outdated tech. 

Discover what to look for in a modern travel platform, from automated policies to traveler support and unified reporting.

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Stefan Thurneer, a senior procurement manager for TX Group, told us that switching to a tool their travelers love has benefited everyone. Previously, they’d been using a travel agency, but employee adoption was low. Employees just wanted to do their own thing (sound familiar?). 

They switched to Perk for an intuitive, user-friendly platform. And now? Employees value autonomy and flexibility with the booking process — but managers and finance teams value something else: 

3. Set up your flight, hotel, and transportation guidelines.

With the right tool in place and your policy guidelines outlined, it’s time to set up your policy in your tool. Use this checklist to set up your policy guidelines in the tool:  

• Flight guidelines: 

  • Global maximums (Strict upper limits for flight costs for any trip) 

  • Specific route maximums, as needed (How much employees can spend on common routes or within common regions) 

  • Cabin class limits (Can employees book business class or first class, and if so, when?) 

  • Advance booking requirements (Do employees need to book a certain amount of time in advance of the flight?)

• Hotel guidelines: 

  • Global maximums 

  • Specific destination maximums (Checking per diem rates for different cities or countries can help with this!) 

  • Star ratings (Can employees book five-star hotels?) 

  • Advance booking requirements

• Train and car guidelines: 

  • Global maximums 

  • Guidance on daily rates

  • Specific route maximums, if applicable for rail

  • Advance booking dates

These booking guidelines will filter the search results your employees see in the tool to only show what fits within travel policy, ensuring compliance.

5. Create traveler groups and dynamic budgets, as needed.

Your travel policy automation and strictness can also vary based on the traveler group. 

For example, the sales or engineering teams might have higher global maximums because they have to book more last-minute trips. C-suite executives and their personal assistants will likely need the power to book what they want, when they want. Account executives for top-tier clients will also likely need a lot more freedom. 

Setting specific approval processes for individual travelers or teams helps you create an automated policy that reflects reality.

Ryan Sumblin, the Head of Accounting at GMG EnviroSafe, recommended also setting up dynamic budgets. This allows your employees to spend a certain percentage higher than the cheapest option available, adjusting for fluctuating costs without having to manually set specific limits for every city your team members visit. 

Their team’s previous company travel policy had straightforward limits: $600 max for airfare and $250 max for accommodation per night. However, since employees travel all over the country and prices vary by season, location, and provider, they didn’t have the flexibility to keep costs lower when possible. 

Now, their team is much more savvy. Combined with a strong inventory, dynamic budgeting automations helps their team spend less money when possible without needlessly restricting team members. 

6. Set up the approval process

Next, set up the approval process, by team or department. Assign an appropriate approver for each traveler group, whether that’s a travel manager, department manager, or finance team member. 

When those groups book travel, the right person is sent a request for trip approval. 

Approval notifications can be a major time-saver for travel managers, finance teams, and more. With your policy already in place, it significantly cuts down on how much needs approval in the first place. Then, automated approval notifications make the process of approvals a snap. 

Many travel managers and finance teams we talk to rave about this part of automated travel policies: 

7. Integrate your travel platform with other tools

With your policy and approval processes in place, the next goal is simple: keep travel and spend data flowing into the systems your business already runs on — without the shadow work of copying, reconciling, and chasing down missing details. 

A unified travel and spend platform like Perk helps by capturing data once and keeping it consistent end to end, cutting down on the “looking-for-receipts” part of your job at the end of every month. 

From there, integrations help connect travel and spend to the rest of your stack to reduce manual work, for example:

• HR systems like Workday and BambooHR 

• ERP systems like SAP and Oracle

• Productivy tools like Monday, ClickUp and Slack

Andrea (from Beekeeper), strongly recommended this. It was a must for her team because they work across many tools, and transferring data manually was a huge time waster.

8. Roll out the automated policy.

Finally, it’s time to roll out your travel policy. Change can be difficult — even when you know it’ll benefit everyone in the long run! 

Implementation with Perk is super straightforward, but we often recommend rolling out a pilot program with just one department to start. If you have a team that travels a lot, start there. 

Try it for a month or two, then gather feedback. When it’s ready, roll out the policy and booking platform to the wider team. If you’re part of a large organization, you can go department by department to provide more dedicated support at each stage. 

Providing some self-guided training for employees — as well as guidance on why you’re implementing a new tool and how it will benefit them — can also help increase adoption. 

Expect an adjustment period, but you’ll start seeing the returns on your investment quickly. When we talked to Tereza, a workplace manager at Creative Dock, she said using automated travel policies had freed up around 70% of admin time: 

So hang in there! The payoffs will be worth it. 

9. Review your travel policy and data at regular intervals to adjust

When you consolidate your business travel spend and bookings to a single tool, you’re able to collect travel data in real-time that will make your policy more accurate.

After you have your policy in place, start reviewing your company travel data quarterly or yearly to make tweaks to your guidelines based on real company data. This is how you turn travel and spend insights into action: tightening what needs tightening, loosening what needs flexibility, and spotting cost efficiencies you might otherwise miss.

When we talked to Andrea, she mentioned that automating their policy made a huge difference in being able to manage expenses and reporting, and improve that policy for the future: 

What’s your next step?

Travel policy automation benefits everyone on your team — from yourself, your travelers, the finance team, and more. 

Plus, it provides tangible ROI for your company. 

• Like Andrea’s team, you could go from spending 30-40% of your time on travel booking to just an hour and a half per week. 

• Or, like Vicki at Fieldin, you could reduce the approvals process to just a few minutes each time, instead of hours of back-and-forth emails. 

Automating your travel policy doesn’t just improve compliance. It reduces the shadow work that piles up around bookings, approvals, and follow-ups. And when that work moves into the background, you can move faster with fewer interruptions, fewer exceptions to untangle, and more time to improve the traveler experience and the program.

Want to see how you can streamline booking, policies, approvals, and travel invoicing all with one simple automated solution? Request a demo and we’ll show you how Perk reduces shadow work — giving people time to focus on the jobs they were hired to do, while giving the business the control and visibility it needs to run smarter. 

That’s when real, everyday breakthroughs happen.

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