I'm also interested in hearing from the schools with strong or growing travel programs. Specifically, if anyone has suggestions on how to drive adoption without support from university leadership.

Thanks!
Cathy

Due to recent events we are revising our policy to make it more clear and using stronger language. Although, our program was already mandated there were many compliance problems and no consequences. We are now adding to the requirements for travel reimbursement and booking through the travel program is top on the list. If travelers book outside of the policy, they will no longer be reimbursed.

We are also looking into pretravel approval solutions to launch when the travel ban is lifted.

We are looking in to this with regards to airline bookings. Currently, we are waiting on our TMC to see if they will be offering basic economy bookings in their system. This would determine if we mandate our employees going back to booking strictly through this TMC.

We instituted TMC mandated travel in 2009 and we are very satisfied. The adoption success was achieved by over communicating the benefits of such. We collaborated with executive leadership and key players throughout the institution. We challenged our travelers to find cheaper airfares and provided alternatives in the event that cheaper travel options were found outside of the TMC. We communicated via email to division and department leadership, newsletters, institution wide forums, departmental meetings, small group meetings, and monthly instructor lead formal classroom training sessions, just to name a few. One of our key drivers is our commitment to duty of care, and we provided strong arguments that such is most efficiently managed when travel bookings are mandated through the TMC.

This is great Karla, do you give students access to your booking tool or TMC for university related travel or study abroad?

We have very limited student travel at this particular University of Texas institution (MD Anderson Cancer Center). Most of our travel is faculty related. What I can tell you is non-employees, inclusive of, but not limited to visiting scientists, professors, researchers, speakers etc. fall under our guest travel process and yes, those trips are booked in Concur. The inviting department submits a guest request in Concur with all the particulars. This information is fed to the TMC where finishing takes place. Thanks

We are in the process of updating our policy at Pitt. Our hope is to mandate airfare, rental car and possibly travel card. I am interested to see how everyone lands with their policies as well. Our policy approval process is quite long. We are hoping to have Travel Standards and Guidelines that are approved soon to handle things while we are still limiting travel under Covid with the hopes it will make the change to policy easier.

Hi Emily, We already mandated our program, enforcing it was difficult to say the least. Due to the COVID pandemic, the senior administration will now completely support the program and no expenses will be approved if the policies are not followed. We are also updating our travel policies to make this more clear. We are also moving to a pre-authorization mandate, once the travel ban is lifted, still working that out. Currently we created a form in Qualtrics that is forwarded directly to the provost office for essential travel exceptions.

I'm happy to jump on a call with you to discuss polies and challenges.

Best,
Laney

During our implementation on Concur Travel and Expense we also implemented a new TMC, we also instilled an airfare requirement. All USD-paid airfare must be procured through our TMC which has a virtual card. This includes guest, faculty, staff, student whose airfare is fund through USD funds such as endowment, operating, grants, etc. We do not reimburse airfare purchased outside of the system. If purchased on a University One Card, it is treated as a personal expense and the card remains on hold until the employee reimburses USD.

Hotels and car rental are encouraged through the system when feasible. Our hope is that the pandemic helped gather support from travelers (we have support from administration).

We are on a hold on travel until further notice. In March the President asked travel be cancelled and future travel not booked until further notice. *Athletics is booking in hopes of games in Spring 2021. We are currently looking to other universities on their approval process for travel exceptions or post-pandemic travel procedures. We are also looking into a Duty of Care partner.

Hi All.

As a TMC I can share with you the turmoil many institutions, who have decentralized travel programs and policies, are experiencing during COVID. The vast majority of calls we have received in the past 6 months are related to financial recovery of decentralized travel expenses - mostly airfare. Since many institutions and businesses having furloughed or laid off staff and faculty, reconciling travel can be a daunting process. And if travelers were allowed to book travel outside of a managed program, you may never recover all of the funds (either through refunds or utilization) for those travel expenses.

Consumer purchased airfare typically will follow the rules of the ticket which means that they have a limited validity period, do not allow names changes, and refunds (if allowed) will go back to the original form of payment ... even if you have already reimbursed the travel expense.

TMCs that manage your travel programs have the ability to negotiate much deeper with the airlines, hotels and car rental companies. When it comes to airfare, a TMC can generally work with the carriers to extend the ticket validity, get name change waivers when fare cannot be refunded, even get change fee waivers with the original ticket is outside of the COVID dates.

We have numerous cases where individual and group trips have been cancelled and we have worked with some carriers to get refunds, as well a bulk credit that can be used for future travel over an extended period of time.

In the post-COVID travel environment, financial protections and Duty of Care are the two most important factors to take into consideration. It costs nothing to retain a TMC for full service agent support. Virtually all TMC, including mine, only charge for services performed on a set fee schedule that is customary across many educational and nonprofit institutions.

Consider implementing an online booking tool (OBT) like SAP Concur Travel as a way to centralize travel, maintain financial controls, as well as upgrade your reporting and duty of care program capabilities.

We are considering a mandate at UNC-Chapel Hill but I'm curious to see if we'll put any teeth behind it. I would love to do what Laney has done at Tulane but it's not quite as simple at a Public University. Have any other public universities not only said they are requiring the use of their TMC/OBT but also enforcing repercussions?

Hi Laney, at Univ of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center our traveling community are faculty, classified employees, and guests. Our non medical campuses have student bodies not us per se'. As far as guests, they don't have access to the travel tool. The inviting department submits the travel request on behalf of the guest. Hope this answered your question. Thanks

Wow! 2009! That is awesome. We are also mandated (2017), we have a short - two page "Booking Airfare" policy that mandates it is booked with our TMC or Concur. If people violate the policy, they receive a "one time pass" and are reimbursed. If they do it again, they are not. To date, we have only had one offender.

We communicated a lot like you did. We didn't hit the Duty of Care as hard because we got a lot of "big brother" push back. If we were to mandate today, I think that Duty of Care emphasis would be received more favorably.

In addition, we were able to get "perks" from the airlines - board room passes, status upgrades and seat upgrades - we gave those out to our most frequent travelers (and biggest critics) to show them how the program would "work for them." This was a big win for us!

This is a great conversation. So helpful. At the UW we have always wanted to look at ways to drive travelers to our program, have never been able to get buy-in from the top. post-COVID made it even more apparent that we needed to. I would like to hear more from other schools, now that there has been even more time since COVID what they have been doing in this direction.

thank you,
Teresa