Hi All,

I would like to understand from the community how your companies are handling Travel Approvals in Concur.

For my company, they wanted to implement very strict controls around approval of trips, so we have gone for the integration of Concur Request with Travel. In our workflow, the employee starts in Travel and selects the flights & hotels they would like to book. Once they have completed their itinerary, this is then sent to Request so that the employee can add their Trip Purpose and submit the itinerary to their manager for approval. We did this so that managers can see the exact costs of the options the employee has chosen.

Whilst this does technically work for us, it does create quite a few headaches for travellers. The biggest problem is that these travel requests have to be approved by the ticketing deadline for the airlines, which is often 11pm on the same day. We also get a few cases where employees go all the way through the Travel process, but then miss the step to actually submit their travel request to their manager.... which causes them annoyance when the system automatically cancels their booking at the ticketing deadline.

The other big headache is that we use alot of Instant Purchase carriers (EasyJet), so in this case we had to setup a step in our workflow that would automatically approve the travel request on behalf of the manager if the itinerary contains one of these IP carriers...

How do your companies handle Travel approval and management of costs? Do you just allow employees to book without approval if the costs are within policy? Do you have any other suggestions of how we could achieve our goals?

Thanks for your feedback,

Dave