Admin Tips & Tricks: Travel Management - Booking Travel

Erica Brown · Dec 7, 2025

Mastering Travel Management

Modern travel management goes far beyond booking flights and filing expense reports. It’s about creating connected, efficient experiences for your travelers while maintaining control, visibility, and compliance every step of the way. Whether you're streamlining approvals, simplifying policy enforcement, or navigating global complexities, these best practices are designed to help you run your travel program better.

In this section, you will find peer and expert-sourced guidance on the following topics:

Booking Travel

Reinforce preferred vendors during travel booking

Within Concur Travel, be more proactive by listing preferred vendors at the top of search results, bringing up the lowest priced tickets or rates first, and using the “preference rank” system on bookings. Promote preferred vendors in training, communications and your travel policy. Or consider inviting your preferred vendors to employee fairs and events.

Mark the Lowest Logical Fare (LLF)

Guide users quickly to the lowest logical airfare in Concur Travel. Control the parameters that define “lowest logical airfare” through your configuration.

Inspire better travel choices with rewards

Encourage smart, policy-aligned decisions by using tools like SAP Concur App Center partner Tripkicks. Integrated with Concur Travel, it surfaces real-time insights—like safety alerts, entry requirements, and eco-friendly options—so travelers can make informed decisions. It also helps companies improve compliance and reward employees for cost-effective behavior, benefiting both the traveler experience and the bottom line.

Use dynamic messaging to guide and enforce your travel policy

Add custom text and pop-up messages in Concur Travel to proactively inform travelers during the booking process. Tailor messages based on destination, vendor, or behavior – like when a hotel isn’t booked or a flight falls outside policy – to improve compliance and support duty of care. You’ll find the custom text option under “Travel Policy Administration.” See more here.

Use Corporate Discount Notes to highlight hotel perks and steer travelers towards better booking choices

Help travelers book smarter by displaying customized, hotel-specific discount notes – like free breakfast, parking, fitness center, or shuttle service – within Concur Travel. These notes appear during booking and help travelers compare options based on your negotiated perks. You can set this up in the Manage Corporate Discounts Administration.

Align your travel approval process with your company’s needs

Concur Travel lets you choose how travel approvals are handled – either by routing to the traveler’s manager or assigning one approver per travel class. For more advanced or customizable approval workflows, consider using Concur Request.

Mitigate the costs of ticket changes or cancellations

Reduce the cost of ticket changes by enabling exchanges and cancellations to be completed within Concur Travel (when applicable). Work with your TMC to see if this feature is supported.

Automatically upgrade seat selections with SeatFinder

If your TMC uses Concur Compleat, our customizable travel fulfillment system, ask them to enable SeatFinder – a tool that monitors seat availability and automatically switches travelers to their preferred seat when it opens. It’s a simple way to improve the travel experience without extra effort. For limitations and exclusions refer to the SeatFinder guide.

Speed up booking with the Clone/Share Trip feature

Help travel arrangers and assistants book faster by enabling Clone/Share Trip in Concur Travel. This feature lets users copy an existing itinerary for themselves or others, then adjust as needed—ideal for teams booking identical or similar trips. It also allows users to share trip details with colleagues, making collaboration easier.

Make group travel easier by sharing trips

When employees are traveling together, they can use Share Trip in Concur Travel to send their itinerary to a colleague, making it easy for others to copy the trip and customize it (like adjusting travel dates). Travelers can also share flight and hotel bookings directly in Microsoft Teams using the SAP Concur app. Once installed by an admin and added by the user, it’s as simple as selecting the app during a Teams conversation.

Strengthen vendor negotiations with better data

If your organization manages travel informally, we recommend requiring travelers to complete the vendor field for Air, Hotel, and Car expense types in their reimbursement requests. Capturing this data makes it easier to track usage trends and gives you the leverage you need in future vendor negotiations.

Connect travel and expense tools to reduce unmanaged or leaked spend

When bookings happen outside your travel system, costs can slip through the cracks. By connecting your travel and expense tools, you make it easier for travelers to report all trip details – giving you better visibility, more accurate forecasting, and stronger control over total spend.

Consider regional top-vendors for one-way savings

Flying from coast to coast? When booking roundtrip travel, don’t overlook the potential savings from choosing different carriers each way. While one airline may offer the best rate from your departure city, your destination may have a different top-vendor. Booking your return leg with that regional carrier can help you reduce overall travel costs.