Final Thoughts on Travel Policy

Having looked at examples of how travel policy works and what happens when travel policy isn’t applied, here are our insights from our research.

First, if you want your travelers to make smart itinerary choices that meet their schedule and cost less, you must use a booking platform that lets travelers easily book (and service) mixed-carrier itineraries. That’s because many of these lower-priced itineraries I identified in part II are mixed-carrier itineraries, like Delta on the outbound and American on the return, Southwest on the outbound and United on the return. 

AmTrav makes this easy by letting travelers pick their outbound and return (and even multi-cities) flights separately. Combining different airlines is harder in tools that only show combined outbound+return itineraries, and is really hard when booking directly with an airline.

Second, the examples shown in part II show why it’s costly to block carriers and not have access to the lowest NDC fares. I’m thinking about travel managers who blocked American Airlines in response to American’s NDC strategy – in that Ashville itinerary, you pay an extra $1200 for Delta because you blocked American. Also, all of these are priced with American, Southwest and United NDC in AmTrav – the fares are higher if your corporate tools can’t access these carriers’ lowest fares via NDC the way AmTrav customers can.

Travel policy insights

So what does this all mean for your travel program?

First, have a travel policy, set basic policy requirements like rate limits and lowest logical controls and cabin controls so your bookers and travelers can easily see your policy and make informed choices. And use that policy to analyze your travelers’ choices.

Second, develop your ground rules for which policy exceptions you’ll let slide and which policy exceptions need to be rejected. Your peer travel administrators and colleagues are a great resource for developing this practice.

And finally, find a modern travel platform that makes setting, adjusting and following policy easy, that lets travelers easily book multi-carrier itineraries and lower NDC fares and apply unused tickets online to save 20% on airfare.

AmTrav spends a lot of time analyzing travel policy and developing our policy software, can we help you craft an effective policy? Reach out, we’re ready to help.