Pre-trip business approval process: walk through

Getting approval for your business travel can be difficult when your organization has strong policies and preferences to what’s being approved, who will be approving, how will the process work & what’s the cost. Let’s take a look at the common steps in pre-trip approval process.

What is Pre-trip approval?

Pre-trip approval is a business approval method where a trip is approved before it has taken place. If you as a traveler or as a travel agent where your client had to get an approval for a business meeting, conference or a meetup went through a series of steps, chances are that’d be part of what’s called the pre-trip approval. Now that’s different from post-trip approval, where a travel is approved by the company after the trip has taken place.

Approval processes are generally labour intensive step in the travel booking process. So there is a basic urge to make it simple as possible to save time. Travel policies within an organization and approval process they have are linked. A pretty simple and straight forward process is no approval at all. All the travel requests are forwarded and booked. Some of them have receive notifications only but all the requests tend to pass.

Strategy and process is required as to why approval is required for most of the companies. It is to be noted with care that a spagety process shouldn’t be the end process. A more complex process can be time consuming and would not be helpful at all.

Let’s look at some of the steps in the process with a simple illustration.

No approval

In a no approval approach, the request is deirectly converted into a booking and then further confirmed as per the needs.

A request with direct ticketing / confirmation.

A request with booking first and then ticketing.

Approval according to the policy

The approval process flow when a travel request has to be approved goes through the concerned departments and superiors for the request to be approved. This can have any number of stages accordingly set up. Each stage/level can also have a reject option according to the policy the company has.

After the request passes through all the approval levels, the trip is authorised and a formal document is generated as shown in the figure below. This document is the travel order document that’s sent to the travel management company.