Hi there! I am very curious to hear what others are doing. Can you explain the sponsored guest user functionality a little bit? Our agency hasnt introduced this to us. For the University of Miami, we created a none-employee/small group request form that an employee must fill out. Within 48hrs, the non-employees can then start calling in only. No concur access. The agents then put the employee that processed the request as the travel assistant.

Hi,

We allow the university employee to book for guests using their existing profile. The guest does not have access to the site. At the beginning of the process, the university employee can choose between booking for themselves, or select the guest tab. After selecting the guest tab, they go through the booking process and at the end, the system allows them to select which credit card to use. The choices are personal card or the university's central travel card. If they select the university card, it prompts them to enter some information specific to the university, such as questions relating to grants used, insurance information, etc. Since all final charges route back using the employee number and org number for the college, once they hit confirm, the reservation in booked in the guest's name, but in the profile of the person responsible for substantiating the charges on the back end. It's a pretty seamless process.

We use the same process that Sedrick describes. Designated employee have the Guest booking permission enabled in Concur and are allowed to book for guests. An application process is used ensuring that the guest travel coordinators only book for guest (not faculty and staff) and postdocs / grad students with financial need.

The guest travel coordinator can also book for groups of ten or more.

Guest bookings whether completed by Guest Travel Coordinator or guests booking on their own must follow the guidelines of the university's travel and business expense policy.

Sabrina, may I ask: how come you allow a guest travel coordinator to only book for a guest and not faculty/staff? What is the downside to having them be able to book for all three.
At the University of Miami, we allow all employees to have the guest function. We find that a lot of travel assistants prefer the function to the booking as a travel assistant to a profiled traveler. Our biggest issue is for departments who's processes require the guest to book for themselves.

The travel arranger/assistant should only book for faculty staff acting as their travel assistant role in Concur - but the guest travel coordinator cannot book on their university issued payment card on another employee's behalf. We report on how many faculty, staff, students and guests are booked. When employees are booked as "guests" it blurs the lines in reporting on which traveler type the guest really is. Another downside is that faculty and staff booked by a guest travel coordinator wouldn't always get frequent travel miles or rewards. Also, when booked as a guest, the unused ticket credits would not be listed in the faculty/staff members Concur profile and this was challenging to track.

Employees must pay for their travel out of pocket or on a University issued payment card that is listed in their Concur profile. We have this in our policy and each guest travel coordinator must take recurrent training each year.

This system has worked well for us since 2013.

@Amanda - An additional downside early on before we transitioned to booking for "guests only and students with financial need" ... the guest travel coordinator was submitting an expense report for the airfare and sometimes the employee would as well. Larger departments would have a hard time keeping track of this issue.

@Sabrina - This all makes sense. Thank you for sharing. We unfortunately do not have concur expense, as the University has purchased a different expense tool before we took concur as a booking tool. We've received complaints from travel assistants who need to book for faculty/students that concur saves credit cards to their profiles, due to this, they prefer to have the "guest function." A lot of them also prefer to have complete control on all travel booked for others, rather than have to login to each profile traveler to review what travel is coming up. Would definitely love to see concur update their travel assistant functions more to meet all client needs.

@Amanda - We havent had Concur Expense for the past three years. I work closely with our expense team to monitor this process. Another thing to be aware of from a reporting standpoint mainly and compliance/audit is employees who allow others to add their payment card in their profile. This has wreaked havoc for large departments from an audit standpoint. There is a great report you can run in Concur ... Travel Reporting > "Concur Travel Credit Cards" that allows you to track this issue.

Good luck with guest booking needs! 🙂

Thanks all for the conversation and responses so far! @Sedrick, thank you for the booking details! What about reimbursements? Do you have/utilize Concur Expense for guests? We have Concur Request, Travel, and Expense and ideally want to use the entire system for our Guest Travelers.

University of Alaska uses Concur for guest travelers. We create profiles for the guests and they can log into Concur and submit requests/expense reports, however most often a delegate takes the action for guests (Request, Expense, Travel). Our corporate travel card or agency travel card is used for bookings.

Contractor/Vendor travel is not processed through Concur, we ask contractors to prepare their own travel and bill as part of their contract/services with a few exceptions.

Instructions and profile form for guest arrangements: https://www.uaf.edu/travel/resources/nonemployee.php