Advanced Features for the Perfect Business Travel Policy

With travel costs rising, and growth in remote teams driving higher demand for internal meetings, creating the right travel policy for your company can lead to a major impact on cost savings and traveler satisfaction.

Spotnana’s advanced policy management features can transform your travel program.

Here are six key features we’ve recently created to help you build a next-generation travel policy for your company.

Dynamic travel policies bring simplicity and flexibility

Travel prices shift in response to seasonality and short term availability issues. Static policies can leave travelers with few or no options for booking in policy when these changes happen. 

Spotnana now supports dynamic policies that determine what is in policy based on rules applied to the results of a specific search. You can, for example, set a policy that allows bookings that are $100 above the lowest fare or 10% below the median fare. Policies can be based on a specific amount or percentage above or below a threshold you define.

Spotnana lets you set dynamic policies for departments, teams, and even individual travelers. New policy groups can be created in seconds.

Our customization extends further with rules for refundability, upgradability, allowed booking window, and cabin class. It’s easy to adjust these rules in our travel manager dashboard, allowing your program to evolve over time with tweaks to guidelines for flight, hotel, car, and rail bookings.

You can also set a unified global policy complete with dynamic guidelines and defined preferred suppliers for your entire global organization since Spotnana integrates all your global offices onto one platform. This significantly reduces the effort needed to manage policies for a global travel program.

Spotnana makes it easy to customize dynamic rules for your travel budget.

Lowest logical fare

For travel managers that want even more granular control over dynamic policies, Spotnana now supports the ability to configure rules for defining a lowest logical fare (LLF) calculation.

Travel managers can set rules that remove fares from the lowest logical fare calculation based on layover duration (i.e. no layovers over 3 hours), number of stops (i.e. no more than one layover), added length to the overall flight time, whether an airport transfer is allowed, and excluded carriers. 

Travel managers can find a balance between saving the company money and considering the traveler’s comfort when determining which fares are in policy.

Our calculations include all NDC fares, as well, so your business travel program is always making decisions based on the best information available. Inside Spotnana’s powerful analytics suite, you can view real-time data on all your program’s travel to help design the policy that works best for you and your travelers. If a policy choice isn’t working as intended, you can tweak all policy rules instantly.

Spotnana’s policy engine lets travel managers set rules for lowest logical fare calculation.

Show options, but do not allow booking

In some cases a travel manager may want to prevent specific travel options from being booked at all. Hiding these options from view can cause travelers to lose trust in a corporate booking tool and book trips elsewhere. 

To avoid this, Spotnana now allows travel managers to configure rules that determine whether a travel option is visible, but not bookable. Travelers will see the travel option grayed out, and rendered inactive.

Spotnana makes it easy to select which fare types can be booked.

Out of policy reason codes

The more complex a travel policy becomes, the more important it is to provide flexibility to travelers who may want to book outside of policy. Out of policy reason codes make it easier for travelers to indicate why an out of policy booking should be approved.

Out of policy reason codes also grant greater insight in the areas where your travelers are bumping up against policy, creating a feedback loop for guidelines you may want to tweak to provide a more seamless booking experience.

Spotnana’s reason codes can be attached to any policy group and are configurable for flights, hotels, car, and rail bookings.

Spotnana allows out of policy reason codes for all travel types.

Custom fields clarify trip purpose

Spotnana now supports custom fields for collecting data during the booking flow. This feature can capture data on the purpose of a trip, assign trip costs to a specific project code or client number, or meet a variety of other needs. 

Many companies have adopted a new focus on trip purpose and value as a way to reduce travel costs and carbon emissions.

Custom fields are fully customizable and can be required or optional. Travel managers can create custom fields based on a single option in a list, multiple options in a list, or multiple options with a percentage allocation.

The data collected through a custom field is available in real time through Spotnana’s analytics.

Travel managers can customize the fields they need for their travel program.

Build your green travel policy

New sustainability research we conducted with the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) found that more than half of U.S. travel programs are tracking carbon emissions in some form. 

Travel managers also expect the importance of sustainability in travel to rise in coming years, underscoring the importance of carbon tracking even if your company doesn’t currently have sustainability goals.

Carbon tracking is built into our platform, presenting travelers with the carbon impact of their travel choices when they book through our integration with a leading global provider. Spotnana supports green travel programs by allowing travel managers to set policy rules based on CO2 per passenger for flights.

Spotnana’s Online Booking Tool and app show the carbon impact of each flight when travelers are shopping, reinforcing the importance of making sustainable choices. Travelers can even view the total carbon footprint that their business travel has produced, leading to increased accountability.

Sustainability data is built into Spotnana’s shopping display and policy engine.

Want to learn more about how Spotnana’s industry-leading architecture and configurable policy functionality can improve your travel program? Request a demo today.