This article is part of the Commercial Rewards Card free plan guide or Commercial Rewards Card paid plan guide, or both. You can navigate back to each guide with the previous links and take the next onboarding steps.
Note: This content may also apply to general TravelBank users.
Create Your Account
To get started, check your email for a message from TravelBank asking you to activate your account. If you don't see one, send an email to implementation@travelbank.com and we will send over an invitation.
Once you follow the link in the email and complete the setup questions, you are good to go!
Employee Management
Adding Employees
Head to Company Settings > Employees to begin managing your employees in TravelBank. The Employee Directory is where you can add, edit, and deactivate all employees and departments in TravelBank. To get started, you can either begin adding your Departments via the "Add" button found at the top right of the page, or use our template to upload both employees and their associated departments all at once.
For each employee, you will be required to add FirstName, LastName, Email, and can optionally add the email of their manager (or whoever is their primary approver), EmployeeID, Department, TravelPolicy, ExpensePolicy, and PrimaryDepartment if they are assigned to multiple. You can also determine advanced permissions, such as whether or not they are an Administrator or a Finance approver.
Best Practice Tip: Once you add or import an employee, it will trigger an activation invite to your end users. It is advised to setup your employees as 'Save for Later' or if you are using the import file to hold on importing users until you have fully configured your site and are ready for them to access TravelBank.
Adding Delegates
Once your employees are added to the system, you can also create host-delegate relationships. Delegates are able to login to their hosts profiles to help book travel or complete expenses on our web platform. To add delegates, go to Employees > Delegates > and from here you can add/remove delegates to host profiles. You may also use the import file to bulk import host and delegate relationships.
Best Practice Tip: Users should be loaded into your site and have activated their user accounts before establishing a host and delegate relationship.
Travel
You will be able to manage all of your travel policies from Company Settings > Travel. To get started, click into Travel Policy and open up your Default Policy. This will be the main policy that all employees will be automatically assigned to unless you manually assign them to another policy you create. You will also see a policy called "No Travel Policy" - assigning employees to this policy will remove any restrictions and policy notifications for that group. Typically we see executives get added to this policy.
Travel Policy
Once you have opened the Default Policy, you will see three separate sections to manage:
Flight Policy
Hotel Policy
Employees in Policy
Flight Policy
Expand the Flight Policy section to get started. The first section, labeled "Setting a Budget for Flights", allows you to create rules that drive TravelBank's dynamic budget to calculate an in-policy average fare for every flight search your travelers run in our platform. This budget is powered by two factors:
Fare Class: Select the fare class your policy allows this group of employees to book for most travel (i.e. Do you allow most employees to fly economy or a higher fare class like business class?); we will use this selection as a filter to find the average cost of all fares for the route your travelers are searching within that particular fare class
Number of Stops: Does your policy allow for employees to take non-stop flights on all routes? Or do you require that employees select the most cost-effective option even if it means adding a layover?
We will add this to the filter on our algorithm to calculate a budget based on your selection of Fare Class and Stops. Once you have selected these two options, you can move on to the next section for Booking Rules.
Advance Booking Requirements: If you require flights be booked within a certain timeframe of departure (e.g. within 14 days of departure), you can select that time frame here. Once you configure your approval and notification rules, any flight booked outside of this window will be considered "Out of Policy"
Flight Cost Hard Cap: If there is a dollar threshold that should trigger an approval before a flight can be booked, you can add this amount here. If the budget for a flight exceeds this amount, we will replace the budget with this hard cap so employees will always know when they are out of policy or when a flight booking requires a second set of eyes
Budget Flexibility: Sometimes a traveler's flight choice in TravelBank are only a handful of dollars above the allocated budget. In those cases, you have the option to create budget flexibility as either a dollar amount or a percentage above the budget to allows travelers to book without worry. As an example, if the budget calculated based on the rules above is $100, but you set a Budget Flexibility of $10, a traveler could book up to $110 without triggering an out of policy rule for approval/notification.
Finally, select your Approval and Notification settings for Flights on this policy. You can choose to be notified for All, Out of Policy (meaning any of the rules above are broken) or No bookings. Notification and Approvals will go to the employee who is assigned as the Manager under the employee directory.
Hotel Policy
Similarly to your Flight Policy, you can set a Hotel Policy that is split into your budget filters and booking rules. First, let's cover your budget:
Hotel Star Rating: Determine the star rating of hotel properties you want the be included in the budget calculation. If you select 3-star properties, we will only factor in the cost of available 3-star hotels when your travelers run a search.
Distance from Search: This determines the miles from the pin-drop on your search that we will include hotels in the budget. For example, if you select 10-miles, we will include every property that matches your star rating selection within a 10 mile radius of your search location in the budget calculation.
As for flights, when your travelers run a search, they will receive a budget based on the average cost of (using the example above) 3-star properties within 10 miles of their search destination. If they go above this budget when they attempt to book a hotel, it will be marked as out of policy. Next, booking rules:
Advance Booking Requirements: Though less common than flight advance booking requirements, you can create a policy rule to ensure hotels are booked earlier rather than later.
Hotel Nightly Rate Hard Cap: This will cap the nightly rate for a hotel property. Meaning if you set this number at $200, and your employees attempt to book a 3-night stay somewhere, the budget will never exceed $600 + taxes/fees. However, if the budget is less than $200/night, it will default to the lower value.
Budget Flexibility: Same concept as for flights, if you want to provide some flexibility on a budget, add that here as a percentage or dollar value.
Finally, choose your approval and notification preferences for your hotel policy. Once done, you have completed building your travel policy! You can create as many policies as you like, just remember that the Default Policy at the top of the list is the one that all employees will land on unless you manually assign them to another policy upon creation of their profile.
Travel Custom Field
TravelBank allows you to add one reportable field to your travel bookings, which can be managed under Company Settings > Travel > Custom Fields. From here you can add and manage a list of options for this field, make it required, and enable or disable as you see fit.
Rewards
If your company has opted in to use TravelBank's Rewards platform to incentivize employees to spend less on hotels when they travel, you can toggle this on under Company Settings > Travel > Rewards. Once on, you can set the percentage of the savings you want to pay back to the employee as an incentive to any value between 20-50%.
You can find more info on our Rewards program here. As a reminder, this is an employer funded program. The cost of rewards is added at checkout to the total cost of the hotel stay, and rebated to the employees Rewards balance after they complete their stay to redeem on gift cards to Amazon.com, Airbnb, Starbucks, charitable organizations and more.
You Have Completed Your Initial Travel Setup!
As a next step, you'll want to make sure you attend an Implementation Walkthrough to speak with a live implementation specialist who can ensure your setup meets your business needs.
Need help?
If you need help, contact the TravelBank travel support team by:
chat within the app,
email at reservations@travelbank.com, or
phone at 866-682-8785.
Publish date: NA
Last update: NA