Booking travel on Ramp: Admin guide

Overview

This article introduces Ramp Travel, outlining the steps for setting up and enforcing travel policies, managing bookings, and overseeing travel expenditures. It explains how admins can configure policies for flights, hotels, and cars, including dynamic rules based on market rates and approval processes for out-of-policy bookings. Additionally, the article provides guidance on tracking trips and expenses and addresses common FAQs related to travel booking and policy enforcement.

Video walkthrough: Set up travel policy, tour the travel dashboard, and book flights, hotels, and cars on Ramp as an Admin. Best when rolling out Ramp Travel so policies and approval flows are ready before your team's first booking. Watch the video.

Choose where to set up your travel policy

Ramp Travel enables you to set up robust controls to inform your employees which flights, hotels and cars are out of policy when booking and also to alert your team when out-of-policy bookings occur.

Open Travel & expenses and choose the guide that matches the controls you see:

Find out more about per diem from the Per Diem Policy on Ramp page.

Enforcing your policy

When your employees search for flights or hotels using Ramp Travel, Ramp will denote which flights or hotels are out of your company's policy as they search on their end.

Departure flights section showing available flight options, including prices and times, with policy enforcement indicators.

When an employee spends out of policy, notifications will be sent out to transaction approvers to review the out-of-policy spend. Please note that Ramp Travel Policies will not decline transactions but notify managers and administrators of out-of-policy spend.

Booking approvals are configured separately from booking rules. See the settings guide that matches your account to configure which bookings require approval.

For example, an admin has set up a travel policy of $500 USD per night for hotels and an approval policy to require approval for all out-of-policy bookings. When an employee tries to book a hotel for $600 USD per night, they won't be able to book directly without the manager's approval. They would submit a request instead of booking, which would trigger a notification to their manager. Once their manager approves, the booking will go through and employees will receive a booking confirmation email. It is possible that the price of booking would change from the time of request, and managers would see the price changes and can decide to approve or reject.

For flights and hotels, users can now request new funds at the end of the booking flow if they have insufficient spend or do not have an available card. By default, all spend requests require manager approval. Admins can modify this by setting up custom logic under Booking Requests settings.

Manage Ramp Travel settings and booking approvals

Travel product settings do not move into the policy document. Continue to manage booking on or off, guest bookings, rewards, preferred hotels, negotiated rates, car-rental corporate codes, and office locations through their existing Ramp Travel workflows.

Booking approvals are a separate, admin-configured control. An admin can require approval before out-of-policy bookings or all bookings complete. The settings guide that matches your account explains where to manage them.

Overseeing trips and travel spend

Administrators on Ramp have the ability to oversee all travel spend at their companies, and managers have the ability to oversee travel spend for their reports on Ramp. You can view your team's upcoming, active, and completed trips by navigating to Travel.

As an admin or a manager, you also can edit an employee's trip, add expenses to a trip, or submit reimbursements on behalf of an employee. If you see a transaction that doesn't belong as part of a trip, simply click the kebab icon next to the transaction and click "Remove Expense". For more details about a transaction, click "View Expense Details".

Travel expenses overview showing total costs, employee details, and trip statuses with edit options for admins or managers.

Ramp will provide insights to you such as cashback accrued, average trip cost, expensive trips, and more.

Clicking the download icon on the table will provide you with a CSV containing even more details, such as reporting on total per diem spend, flight spend, hotel spend, and more.

Frequently asked questions