Corporate travel glossary
Pre-trip approval
Also called: pre-trip authorisation · travel request approval
Pre-trip approval is a control requiring a business trip to be authorised before it is booked rather than after it is taken. The request records purpose, destination, dates and estimated cost, and routes to approvers by rule — typically value, travel class, destination, or how close to departure the booking falls.
In practice
- Triggered by threshold rather than applied to every trip, or approvers stop reading them
- Estimated cost is captured at request and actual cost at booking — the gap is what to report on
- Escalates to a second approver above a value, or for restricted destinations
- Auto-approves anything inside policy, so the control does not become the bottleneck
- Linked to the booking itself, so an unapproved trip cannot be ticketed
Why it matters
Approval obtained after booking is not a control, it is paperwork: the fare is held and any cancellation cost is already real. The measure of a working pre-trip process is how many trips it changes, not how many it records.