Set up Policy Agent travel settings

Overview

If your travel policy settings live in your policy document, travel rules live alongside the rest of the expense policy in one plain-language document. This guide explains how to manage those rules and set per diem in Policy Agent.

Available on Ramp Plus. See Ramp Plus overview for plan details.

Manage travel rules in your Policy Agent document

From Policy > Travel & expenses, find Policy knowledge near the top of the page and select View. In the policy document, write clear and explicit rules, and publish your changes. Allow a few minutes for published rules to take effect.

For example, you can write "Flights and hotels must be booked at least 14 days in advance," "No suites," or "No Friday, Saturday, or Sunday check-ins." Ramp can evaluate rules for:

• Destinations by city, state, or country
• Specific hotels and airlines by name
• Fixed price caps, percentage-over-market caps, and GSA lodging caps
• Ordered flight cabin classes and advance-booking requirements
• Room-rate comparisons within the same hotel and stay
• Hotel check-in days of the week

Ramp cannot evaluate neighborhood- or distance-based locations, comparisons across different flights or hotels, normalized or ranked room tiers, or rules that require external data. For example, "Book the cheapest nonstop flight" requires a cross-offer comparison and is not enforceable. Rules such as "No suites" use best-effort matching against room names supplied by the hotel, so generic or missing room names may not match.

Travel rules label out-of-policy options in search results; they do not, by themselves, decline or hard-block a booking. Without a separate booking approval requirement, a booking can complete and the resulting expense remains flagged for managers and Admins to review.

Set per diem rules in Policy Agent

When your travel policy lives in the Policy Agent document, write daily per diem limits as fixed amounts or relative to GSA meals rates. For example, you can write "Fixed USD 80 for everyone" or "20% above the GSA meals rate."

Policy Agent uses these rules to evaluate eligible card spending attached to a trip; per diem is not evaluated during booking.

For how per-diem spending is tracked and reviewed, see Per diem policy on Ramp.

Configure travel booking approvals

Booking approvals are a separate, admin-configured control. An admin can require approval before out-of-policy bookings or all bookings complete. Under Additional controls, open Ramp Travel bookings to configure them.