Intro to Ramp Travel | Demo

The short version

Out-of-policy travel spend is a recurring headache. You set rules (book a week ahead, cap the cabin class, stay under market rate), and employees book anyway. The charge clears, and you're stuck auditing line items at month-end and chasing receipts that should've been blocked at checkout.

Ramp Travel enforces your T&E policy at the moment of booking, not after the fact. 5 features make this work: pre-purchase blocking, automated categorization, adoption-driven traveler profiles, refundable-only hotel rules, and the upcoming Employee Rewards feature.

Top 4 takeaways from the webinar

1. Out-of-policy spend gets blocked at checkout

When an employee selects an out-of-policy flight or hotel, the Book button disappears. A Submit Request button takes its place, and no charge clears until an admin approves the request from the Travel Requests inbox.

With Ramp Travel, you close that loop before money moves.

2. One platform cuts your month-end reconciliation work

When booking and corporate card spend live in the same system, every flight and hotel transaction gets auto-categorized into the right accounting category the moment it clears. Receipt capture and memo generation happen automatically.

3. The refundable-only hotel toggle saves more than you'd expect

Inside Spend Guidelines, you can restrict hotel search results to refundable fares only with a single toggle. It pairs naturally with the one-week lead time and market rate cap you configure in the same section.

5. Employee Rewards turns travelers into cost-conscious bookers

On the roadmap, Ramp calculates a market price for a given trip. If an employee books below it, you return a configurable percentage of the savings back to them.

Aditya walked through the mechanic: "let's say that's $400 for a flight to New York City. If your employee ends up booking something that's less than that, so let's say $300, you can actually set a specific percentage of that $100 in savings that you've then basically created and give that back to the employee."

Instead of auditing every line item, you give employees a direct reason to reduce travel costs by choosing the cheaper flight.

Why is out-of-policy spend still slipping through?

Ramp Travel enforces your travel policy at the moment of booking, not after the transaction clears. That's the opposite of how most teams handle it today.

If you're enforcing travel policy right now, you're probably doing it after the fact. An employee books, the transaction clears, and you review it later (either denying reimbursement or flagging the booker). Aditya described several reasons this keeps happening:

• There's no way to enforce policy at the point of purchase
• Data is fragmented across booking and accounting systems
• Employees skip the designated tool whenever it's clunky.

Ramp Travel flips that approach. You configure your policy once, and it's enforced automatically every time an employee opens the booking flow. When a selection violates policy, the Book button disappears and a Submit Request button takes its place, sending the request straight to an admin's inbox.

Everything else in the product builds on that same idea. Approval workflows are if-this-then-that rules layered on top of the same enforcement logic. Automated categorization applies it to your accounting. Employee Rewards applies it to incentives. You configure once, and the manual work falls away.

The technique that makes all 5 features work: Spend Guidelines configuration

You can configure your entire travel policy in 5 steps under Settings > Expense Policy > Spend Guidelines. Jenny ran the full configuration live, and the steps below mirror what she built on screen.

1. Set your flight rules: Toggle market rate enforcement, add a hard price ceiling, and set a booking lead time. You can also configure cabin class rules. You can always select economy, economy plus opens up for flights over 4 hours, and premium economy depends on leg length.
2. Set your hotel rules: Same structure as flights, with the added toggle to show refundable fares only.
3. Set per diem caps: Under the per diem tab, set a maximum daily spend per traveler.
4. Build your approval workflow: Use the if-this-then-that builder under Approvals. In Jenny's example, an out-of-policy booking required a manager plus an additional admin to approve. If a new spend request came in, the manager's manager could be notified as well. Pre-built templates are available for faster setup.
5. Save and ship: Your employees see the new rules the next time they open the Travel section. No retraining, no policy memo, no manual enforcement.

Start with flight rules. They likely cover the largest share of your T&E spend.

What an out-of-policy booking attempt actually looks like

Jenny ran a same-day search from JFK to Cincinnati, departing the next day and returning Friday. The results page shows filters for stops, price, airline, impulse fares, and departure time. The interface highlights the market rate directly, so you can see at a glance what's reasonable. Because the policy was set to a $700 ceiling for travel expenses, the booking allowance displayed as $519 for that route.

Because the search was 1 day in advance against a one-week lead time rule, every result displayed as out-of-policy. Jenny selected an out-of-policy flight anyway to show what happens at checkout. Instead of a Book button, she saw a Submit Request button, meaning a manager or admin would have to approve before any charge cleared.

The employee fills in the trip name ("Visit to Ohio"), purpose ("Visit customers"), and selects an applicable spend program. Spend programs that don't permit travel (an office supplies card, for example) appear as unavailable in the dropdown. Submit Request fires the booking into the admin's Travel Requests inbox.

On the admin side, the Travel Requests inbox shows all pending bookings with Approve or Deny actions, and no charge clears until approval.

If the price changes between request and approval, the requester gets a notification so they can rebook at the new price.

The traveler profile feature—a core piece of any managed travel program—deserves its own mention. Your employees save their loyalty program numbers, TSA PreCheck, and known traveler numbers once under My Ramp > Travel. That data applies automatically on every subsequent booking, which removes the friction that drives employees to book outside the platform in the first place.

Approvals and multiple policies

You don't have to settle for a one-size-fits-all approval process. Ramp Travel lets you build configurable workflows using the same if-this-then-that builder you use elsewhere in Ramp. Pre-built templates for approval workflows speed up the configuration if you don't want to build from scratch.

Multiple Travel Policies is a separate feature available to Ramp Plus customers, while the single-policy setup is available to all Ramp accounts.

"You can essentially create one policy for your executive team, and you can create another policy for, let's say, specific managers and another policy for everyone else. And so you have that flexibility from group to group in terms of what kind of policy you wanna create."

If your HR system is integrated with Ramp (a Plus capability), department data flows in automatically and assigns employees to the correct policy without manual mapping.

Automated categorization and the TravelPerk handoff

Every spend program you set up in Ramp ties to an accounting category. When an employee charges a flight to their Ramp card during an active trip, the transaction gets auto-categorized into the flight category, hotel charges land in the lodging category, and receipts and memos generate automatically.

“When you look at expenses, these will be auto categorized for you. So this airline flight was in its own category, same with lodging, etcetera. So that just completely eliminates all that busy work of having employees having to categorize those transactions."

This works even when the booking originates outside Ramp Travel. If an employee books through the TravelPerk integration, Ramp reads the itinerary off the emailed receipt and creates a corresponding trip record, and any Ramp card spend during that trip window gets auto-categorized the same way.

The one feature only available when booking directly through Ramp Travel is the hard block on out-of-policy bookings at checkout. TravelPerk bookings retain expense management, categorization, and your policy settings in Ramp, but the pre-purchase enforcement layer requires Ramp Travel itself.

You can process cancellations directly from the trip's itinerary section, and Priceline's prioritized support queue handles flight modifications for changeable fares.

See how Ramp fits in

If you're still catching out-of-policy travel spend after the fact, or losing hours every month-end reconciling data from multiple sources, Ramp Travel solves both problems. You configure your policy once, and enforcement happens automatically.

Pre-purchase enforcement, automated categorization, no booking fees, and Priceline-negotiated hotel rates are all included with Ramp.