Business

10 Travel policy best practices for your company

Travel policy best practices covering booking, spending limits, duty of care, and policy reviews.

Welcome.

In this guide, we’ll share 10 travel policy best practices, from defining who can travel and why to reviewing the policy on a schedule.

If your team travels internationally, Holafly for Business keeps employees online with secure mobile data.

In this article

1. Define who can travel and why

It’s best to start your policy with who can travel, for what reasons, and when.

Here’s what to spell out:

List approved trip types (e.g., client meetings, conferences, training, required on-site work).
Separate essential from nonessential travel to prevent unnecessary trips.
Set “no travel” windows, such as audit periods or financial downturns.
Note any limits on who can travel internationally.

2. Involve stakeholders and travelers early

A travel policy affects nearly every department, so it’s a good idea to bring in finance, HR, legal, and operations early, along with your frequent travelers.

Ask them what works via surveys, focus groups, or a 0–10 satisfaction score. Assign a policy owner for updates and reviews, and get executive support (e.g., a launch note from your CFO) before rollout.

Pro tip: Our guide to building a corporate travel program maps out who owns each part of the program.

3. Write in plain language and make it easy to find

Travelers often open the policy looking for one answer, so write for skim readers with descriptive headings, bullet points, and key details in bold. Skip the legalese and aim for an eighth-grade reading level.

It’s also a good idea to offer a one-page quick-reference guide and place it inside your booking tool, expense platform, and intranet.

Our guide to a business travel policy for employees includes a free template.

4. Set booking rules and pre-trip approvals, with room for exceptions

Tell employees how to book (e.g., via a travel management company, an online booking tool, or with suppliers) and name your preferred airlines, hotels, and car rental companies. Generally, it’s best to ask for bookings two weeks in advance for domestic trips and three weeks for international ones.

Approval requests should include:

Destination
Dates
Purpose
Estimated cost

Lastly, build an exceptions process for urgent out-of-policy bookings (e.g., rebooking after a late-night cancellation). A separate last-minute booking category keeps those trips from skewing your data.

5. Set realistic spending limits and per diems

Well-defined limits make costs easier to predict.

Here’s what to cover:

Air: Economy for domestic flights, with business class on flights over six hours, plus a rule on frequent flyer miles.
Lodging: Nightly caps by city tier, benchmarked against GSA rates ($113 a night is the FY 2027 standard), and weekly rates for stays of five nights or more.
Ground transport: Approved options, rental car classes, and mileage at the IRS standard rate.
Meals: A per diem (a flat daily allowance) or actual costs with receipts, along with a rule on alcohol and client entertainment.

6. Make expense reporting and reimbursement simple

Expense claims are often the most confusing step for new travelers, so spell out the process in your company travel expense policy.

Here’s what to include:

Set a submission deadline of 5–10 business days after the trip.
Commit to a reimbursement turnaround (e.g., 10–15 business days).
Require itemized receipts for amounts exceeding a set threshold (e.g., $25–75).
List non-reimbursable items (e.g., minibar charges, unauthorized upgrades).
Explain what happens to rejected claims.

We also recommend corporate cards for high-cost purchases, so employees don’t have to cover them with personal cards.

7. Build in duty of care and travel risk management

Business travel duty of care is an employer’s legal and ethical obligation to protect traveling employees from foreseeable harm.

Here’s how to put it into practice:

Provide a 24/7 emergency number.
Run pre-trip checks on travel advisories, visas, and local laws.
Require travel insurance and share the carrier’s details.
Add extra approvals, security briefings, and check-ins for high-risk destinations.
Prepare contingency plans for lost passports, flight disruptions, and natural disasters.
Track traveler locations (with their consent).

Our guide to business travel risks covers how to manage the most common threats.

8. Cover bleisure, executives, and different traveler needs

Rigid rules create workarounds, so make room for cases that don’t fit a standard trip.

Here’s how:

Bleisure: Employees may extend a trip with manager approval, and the company pays only for the business portion of the trip.
Executives: Document any higher cabin class or hotel caps, as written exceptions are defensible.
Accessibility and inclusion: Establish a process for approving needs, such as a different seat class due to a disability.
Remote staff: Cover trips to HQ, team offsites, and co-working costs.

9. Automate enforcement and track the data

The most effective way to enforce a travel policy is to build its rules into your booking tool, so out-of-policy choices are flagged before purchase.

Then, track key metrics, including:

Booking channel use
Preferred supplier use
Average trip cost
Exception rate
Reimbursement time

You can then use the data to negotiate supplier rates and audit patterns over individual receipts. Check our guide to corporate travel management to learn more.

10. Review and update the policy on a schedule

Treat your travel policy as a living document and review it every 6–12 months. That said, some events should trigger an immediate review.

For example:

New or expiring vendor contracts
Expansion or mergers and acquisitions
Tax or regulatory changes
Major incidents (e.g., a natural disaster)

When you publish changes, explain what changed and why, update every copy, and give employees a grace period before enforcing new rules.

Give traveling employees secure data with Holafly for Business

When your team is on the road, secure mobile data is key.

Holafly for Business is an eSIM provider available in 160+ destinations that activates on your team’s devices, so they don’t have to worry about local SIM cards or roaming charges. You also get access to our centralized management platform, the Holafly Business Center, where you can manage individual eSIMs, invoices, and data usage.

Holafly Plans for Business come in four tiers, all featuring hotspot, 4G/5G, and 24/7 multilingual support:

Daily: Unlimited data with pay-per-day flexibility, built for short business trips under 16 days a month.
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Not sure which plan is right for your team? Book a demo.

Max Woolf

Writer

I’m a writer with over eight years of experience in digital content. My work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Forbes, Business Insider, and the BBC. At Holafly, I write clear, practical guides to help travelers stay connected with eSIM technology. In my spare time, I enjoy car detailing, biking around Warsaw, and capturing portraits.

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