Egencia TripController Enhancements December 2009 1
What s New & Enhanced with TripController? For Travel Approvers: Trip Approver E-mail Enhancements New One Click Approval & Email Approval TripController Link & Pending Approvals New TripController Approval Page Trip Approval Workflow Enhancements: Approval Delegation Approval Workflow Backup Approver Delegation Itinerary Price Change Option Last Minute Exception Option 2
Trip Approver: E-mail Enhancements E-mails sent to travelers during the Trip Approval process are now in an easier to read format. Additionally, all approval items (flight, hotel, car) are now in one email for items that are booked by a traveler at the same time. This reduces emails sent to an approver. New New Trip Trip Approval Approval Pending Pending E-mail E-mail Old Old Trip Trip Approval Approval Pending Pending E-mail E-mail 3
Trip Approver: E-mail Enhancements More information is included in the approval request emails. This means approvers can make more informed decisions regarding whether or not to approve a travel request. Items included in the approval email based on travel plans: Traveler name (if guest account, we will show the Account name + (Guest)) Traveler email address Itinerary start date Itinerary number Item type (e.g.: Flight, Hotel Car, etc) Item description (e.g.: Chicago Seattle) Arranger name Item price Lowest logical fare Item start date (e.g. departure date of first flight, hotel check in date) Item end date (e.g. arrival date of last flight, hotel check out date) Policy status Out of policy reason Department CDFs Booking status Approval status Comment date Comments Commenter s name 4
Trip Approver: New One Click & Email Approval Egencia has one click approval & email approval. This makes it easy for approvers to quickly approve or deny trip requests from email or a mobile device without having to first view a traveler s itinerary. With one click approval, the approver will receive an email approval request from the traveler. Their options will be to Approve all items, Deny all items or to View the trip online which will allow them to approve or deny items more selectively (e.g. they might want to approve the hotel but deny the flight and car). Once the approver clicks Approve all or Deny all, they will see a page letting them know that their action was successfully applied or that it wasn t (e.g. a backup approver already acted on the approval request, the itinerary changed in some way so the request is no longer valid or the itinerary was deleted). Companies can now select whether approvers musts sign-in to the Egencia website before approving or denying a travel request or allow approvers to do this via email or a mobile device. Note One click approval can be turned off. If it is turned off, then the only option for the approver will be to view the trip online 5
Trip Approver: TripController Link & Pending Approvals A new TripController link will appear in the Egencia web site header bar when TripController is turned on for at least one traveler group in the company. The link takes the Travel Manager/Approver to their trip controller page, where they can see all the items they need to address. Egencia has also updated the text on the home page to indicate the number of pending approvals so that it s easy to quickly know the number of outstanding requests. 6
Trip Approver: TripController Approval Page The new TripController page will have 2 modules: 1. Trips awaiting your approval: This will show all trips you need to approve, both as the original approver and as the backup approver. 2. TripController all approvals pending report for TMs/Global Arrangers: This will show all pending approvals for the company. 7
Workflow: Itinerary Price Change Enhancements TripController now detects price changes for itineraries that have been previously Approved. This occurs when the price of an itinerary exceeds the set threshold set by the client. New New Price Price Change Change and and previously previously Approved Approved itinerary itinerary 8
Workflow: Itinerary Price Change Enhancements Price changes can occur after a trip has been approved, but before it s booked. Egencia now gives companies the ability to set up thresholds to determine how much they will allow the price of an Approved itinerary to increase, before a new Trip Approval request is required for domestic and international flights. These settings are applied to the final price check just before a flight is booked Note: Some itineraries are not eligible for purchase on the Egencia web site and are not validated by TripController settings. This includes Exchanges, Split Tickets, Round the World and International itineraries with more than six segments. These itinerary-types must be handled offline in Sabre. 9
Workflow: Approval Delegation Enhancement TripController allows travel managers to delegate additional and alternate Approvers who can approve travel, if allowed by the Travel Manager / company s policy. Travel Managers have the choice to either lock down approval delegation so only they can set up backup approvers, or they can let approvers assign their own list of backup delegates who can also approve travel. 10
Workflow: Approval Workflow Enhancement The Egencia web site can be configured to push approval of a trip request to established delegates, within a specified time frame, if the approver has not responded within the designated time period. The time ranges from 30 minutes to 3 days. After a traveler sends a trip approval request, and the request for approval has hit the specified time limit, it will then be forwarded to the backup approvers 11
Workflow: Backup Approver Delegation Enhancement TripController now allows clients to delegate additional and alternate Approvers who can approve travel, if allowed by the Travel Manager / company s policy. Allowing approvers to delegate their approval requests to one or more backup approvers, means travel requests can be addressed in a more timely manner. There is no limit to the number of backup approvers it can be limited to a single person or a group of people. Additionally, immediate delegation can also be selected. This gives the approver the ability to immediately delegate requests to a backup approver as soon as a request is received. This is a great option to select if the approver is going to be out of the office or sharing approval responsibilities with others. 12
Workflow: Backup Approver Delegation Enhancement When the workflow time limit has been reached or the approver has selected immediate delegation, an email will be sent to both the approver and the backup that the approval request has been delegated. The backup approver can then either approve or deny the trip request. Please note: Even though a request has been delegated, the original approver has not lost their privileges to approve the trip If there is more than one backup approver, when someone does act on the approval request, Egencia will not send mail to notify all the approvers that an action was taken. This reason is that it is now very easy (single click from email) to see the approval status and to reduce the number of emails that may be perceived as spam. If what appears to be a pending request has already been acted upon when someone tries to approve or deny the item, instead of receiving a successful confirmation page, they will receive a page letting them know that the travel request has changed and their action can not be processed. At this point they can go to the View all recently approved trips link on the TripController page to see what has happened to the request. 13
Workflow: Last Minute Exception Enhancement For each traveler group, there is a Last minute booking exception setting that turns off pre-trip approval, if an item being booked is within a certain number of hours of the start of travel. Previously, the lowest value in the drop-down was 12 hours. Based off of customer feedback, Egencia has added smaller time values which are 4 hour and 6 hour options. 14