How to write a travel policy people will actually follow

Most corporate travel policies are written after an incident. Someone books business class to Delhi, finance escalates, and a policy appears the following week. It is a document designed to stop a thing that already happened.

Policies written that way tend to be long, defensive and widely ignored. The better approach is to write for the ninety percent of trips that are entirely ordinary.

Start with defaults, not limits

A limit tells someone what they cannot do. A default tells them what to do, which is what they actually want to know.

Instead of a maximum fare of thirty thousand rupees, say economy on the cheapest reasonable flight within two hours of the requested departure. That is a rule someone can follow without doing arithmetic.

Make the compliant path the fastest path

If booking in policy takes three forms and booking outside it takes one phone call, people will make the phone call. This is the single most common reason policies fail, and it is entirely a process problem.

People do not break travel policy to save themselves money. They break it because the compliant route was slower and they had a flight to catch.

Name the approver, not the department

Requests sent to finance sit in a queue. Requests sent to a named person get a decision. Every policy should specify who approves what, by name or by role, with a stated turnaround.

Handle the exceptions explicitly

There will be exceptions. A red-eye before a major client presentation, a last-minute trip to fix a live problem, a traveller with a medical requirement. If the policy pretends otherwise, every exception becomes an argument.

Write the exception route into the policy. Who can authorise it, what justification is needed, and how fast it will be turned around.

Give the numbers a reason

A cap of eight thousand rupees a night sounds arbitrary until you explain it covers a four-star property within thirty minutes of the client site in most Indian cities. People follow rules they understand considerably better than rules they do not.

A one-page test

If your travel policy does not fit on one page, most of your team has not read it. The detail can live in an appendix; the page people actually use should answer four questions.

• What cabin and fare am I allowed to book?
• What is the hotel limit in this city?
• Who approves this, and how long will they take?
• What do I do when something goes wrong at 2am?

If your current policy cannot answer those four in under a minute, that is the thing to fix first.