When it comes to booking flights and hotels for business trips, you can now create a simple travel policy for your employees to follow. Based on your settings, we will flag flight or hotel reservations that are outside the boundaries of the policy you have put in place.
With this, employees will have a clear understanding of what they can and cannot book, which will improve compliance with your travel policy.
How to set up an Travel Policy?
Company Owners and Admins can set up travel policy by following these steps:
Click Sign in on the WegoPro homepage and select your company (You can directly sign in using your company's WegoPro URL as well).
Go to Company settings and select Policy.
You will see a section for Travel policy, where you can set your Policy for flights and hotels based on budget, class, or advance booking.
Click Edit next to the section you'd like to define.
For flights you can define your policy based on the following criteria:
Advance booking: Number of days in advance employees must book their flight
Cabin class: Default cabin class you want employees to book (you can set exceptions for longer flights)
Budget: Maximum budget for all flights (with exceptions for longer flights and flights for specific routes)
💡 Pro-tip: For tighter control on flight budgets, setup route based budget exceptions instead of duration based ones. You may select a specific airport, or all airports for a city, or an entire country when defining your budget. We recommend you setup only one type of budget exception (duration or route) to avoid confusion.
Similarly, for hotels, you can define your policy based on the following criteria:
Advance booking: Number of days in advance employees must book their hotel
Class: Default class of hotel allowed (e.g. 4-star)
Budget: Maximum budget for hotel bookings (with an option to add exceptions for cities/countries)
Applying policies
As a company admin or owner, you have the option to set up policies either at an individual employee level or at a group level. To provide more control and clarity over group level policies, you can now set a primary group for each employee. Once set, the travel policy associated with this primary group is selected and applied for the employee when they submit a travel booking request. Employees will no longer be able to change the designated approvers, unless overridden by admins at the employee level.
👥 Group level policy
Navigate to Company Settings and then click on Groups
From the list of existing groups, select the one you want to update
In the group details view, you'll find information like the group name, approval process, approvers, group members, and the policy section.
By default, the default policy applies to the members of a group if not explicitly set
Alternatively, if the admin prefers to set a custom policy for the group, they can select a custom policy from the list of travel policies setup
Finally, click the Save group button to save your changes
👔 Employee level policy
Navigate to Company Settings and then click on Users
Locate the specific employee you want to set up a policy for, and click on their name
In the Edit user modal, select an Travel policy for this employee
Click on Save to save your settings
How is the policy determined for a travel booking request?
This will largely depend on whether the employee who is submitting the travel booking request has an employee level policy, a primary group, the travel policy set for the primary group, or otherwise. The following describes the process of selecting the travel policy in each of these cases:
If the employee submitting the travel booking request has a Travel policy set at the employee level, this policy is selected and applied to the travel booking request.
If the employee submitting the travel booking request does not have a travel policy set at the employee level, but has a primary group setup, the travel policy is picked up from the employee's primary group.
If the employee submitting the travel booking request does not have a travel policy set at the employee level, nor do they have a primary group set, the Default policy is applied to the travel booking
If an employee is a member of one or more groups but none of the groups are designated as the employee's primary group, and the admin has not set up any policy at the employee level, then the default policy will be applied.
If an employee is removed from a group, even if it was their primary group, and the admin has not set up any policy at the employee level, the default policy will still be applied to that employee.
What happens if the admin deletes or updates a policy?
Once a travel booking has been submitted by the employee in the past and is attached to a deleted policy (Policy A), it will continue to be associated with that same policy (Policy A).
Let's consider a scenario where Policy A is attached to a specific travel booking request that has still not been approved. If the admin updates the set of rules for Policy A, the new set of rules will only be applied to future travel booking request. They will not be applied to the submitted travel request retrospectively.
📝 Note: By default, we only show a warning for out of policy trips. If you need to enforce approvals for out of policy trips, you can do so in Trip approvals
💡 Pro-tip: Employees can click on the 📖 icon on the navigation bar (top right) to view the current travel policy