Video: Streamline travel and expense management with the combined power of Amtrav and Emburse | Duration: 1928s | Summary: Streamline travel and expense management with the combined power of Amtrav and Emburse

Transcript for "Streamline travel and expense management with the combined power of Amtrav and Emburse": Hello, everyone. We'll we will be getting started very shortly. Alright. Hello, everyone. I'm so glad you could join today's webinar, streamline streamline travel and expense management with the combined power of AmTrav and Imverse. I'm Lauren Boyd. I'm your customer marketing manager and your host today. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. This webinar is being recorded, and you'll receive the recording afterward. Check out the engagement area on your right. You can ask questions in the q and a tab and download useful resources, including AmTRAB's latest report in the documents tab. To schedule a follow-up meeting, click the request a follow-up button at the top. Let's get this webinar started. Over to you, Fran. Hi. Thank you. I'm Fran Ball, and I'm the senior director of partnerships here at AmTrap. And then I'll give that over to Matt. Yeah. Thanks so much, Fran, and thanks everyone for taking some time to join us. My name is Matthew Rollins. I'm one of the client sales managers here at Imbursed. So happy to have the opportunity to chat with you all a little bit more about Imbursed and Amtrav's partnership. From an agenda standpoint today, we would love to share just a handful of of existing customer stories, and then we're gonna have Fran take us through an actual live product demonstration. If we have time, we'd love to answer a couple of questions as they come in through the queue as well. So, Fran, I I guess just to kick things off, with the customer stories, you know, we were talking offline. We obviously had the privilege to work with one another for a number of years. I'm just curious when when it comes to super successful customers, what what sorts of of customers come to mind for for you? And and maybe we can, share a specific one or or 2 if if you have anything in mind. Well, Matt, thank you for for bringing that up. We have a couple here that I've actually brought, some some quotes from our our existing clients. Ashley has been one of our clients now for for many years, and, you know, she she brought this sentence in and said that Amtrak's booking tool makes everything more efficient and automated. It's so much smoother and easier to see everything on one page. And this is really what we want to make sure that your travelers can see everything in one page, but also the admins. So we want to make sure that the tool is is really useful, but we have another as well, and, we'll bring that up in just a bit, but I think that we're going to do some poll questions first. Yes. We have one poll already open. It's how are you managing your travel. Everyone can go ahead and fill that out. You'll see it on the screen right now, and it's also located in the poll tab. We'll leave this open for a little while. This this is always a a fun one. I'll just chime in and say it's interesting being the travel and expense automation partner. And you you see such a wide variety of answers. Obviously, we just got the 4 here. So no wrong answer. Feel free to chime in, and we just love to know a little bit more about the audience and and kind of where you're at in your journey so far. Alright. I'm gonna leave it open for another second or so. And alright. I'm gonna close it. Wow. We have a lot of DIY. Yeah. Yeah. And I believe we have one more poll. Let me open it up. So if you'll wanna take a second to fill out the second pool, how does your organization currently pay for business travel? Oh, wow. It almost instantly answered. Fran, this is another one that over the years, we've seen we've seen a bunch of different answers, and and I would I would even say a little bit of ebb and flow in terms of what we see and and when we see it. Looks like company credit card is leading the way right now. Yeah. I I tend to find that to be the case too. The company credit card definitely is the the most used option. Cash advance from the company. Wow. That's great. Alright. I'll leave it open a few more seconds, but I think we are at so, yeah, we will go back now to our presentation. Hey, Fran. Yep. Alright. So this is our Amtrak customers. What we like to show is that most of our customers are experiencing about a 97% online booking adoption. You know, the reason for that is is just the ease of the booking tool, and that really stands, to show it shows to Stan why we want travelers to use those online booking tools because they've got everything at their fingertips. We also found that there is a 20% savings overall based on airlines, hotels, and cars that the, the average company is is achieving right now. Now that can be everything from negotiated rates on hotels, and then we also you know, savings based on on the spend that you have with the carriers as well as making sure that your car vendors have a negotiated rate. And then really important, 247 service ready to ready to help you. We'd rather your travelers call us at 3 in the morning than call you at in the morning. So that 247 service is going to be very important. Just real quick about Amtrak. Amtrak has been in in business for over 30 years. So we are a full travel management company, and we're here to help your travelers. But the ease of the tool is beneficial to both the admin and to the travelers. Alright. I think we're doing one more poll. Am I? Yes. And I'm just sharing the poll with you right now. What's the most important thing you're looking for in your travel program? You heard about some of the perks of Amtrak, so let's just see what y'all are interested in. I'll leave this open for another 20 seconds or so. Look at that savings. Who doesn't love savings? And compliance comes right behind that every time. We'll show we'll show the compliancy and the demo as we go through how that can factor into this. And they really do go hand in hand, savings and compliancy. Alright. I am going to close the poll right now, and I'm gonna send it over to you, Fran, to start the demo off. Perfect. Alright. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen then, and we're gonna start off with our our demonstration of the site. Now, one of the key factors with with Inverse and Amtrak is that, that single sign on that your travelers will have the experience of going in, have being on the Inverse tool, and then going directly to travel, coming right over and going into Inverse certified powered by Amcap. Now the view that we're looking at today is an admin view. A little bit more for the traveler. Travelers are going to be able to see the flights, the hotels, and cars, but they'll also be able to see their trips if they've been invited to a meeting, their unused tickets, and their travel reports. Now where I'm gonna start off today is we're gonna go into our, the company settings. That's at supplier relations area. So that's going to be where work with your relationship manager here at Amstrad to set up your contracts with your airlines, your hotels, and your car vendors. Once we do this, we can mark them as preferred, and they'll show on our site as preferred vendors. Now this also is attaching your personal contracts and your negotiated rates. Amtrak will negotiate 100 and thousands of hotels on behalf of all clients, and you'll see those in there as an Amtrak rate. But if you have a specific hotel that needs to be negotiated, we're able to do that as well. The areas where that compliancy comes into play, so we had our savings and compliancy. Now that's going to be in the form of our travel policy. These are customizable. You can have as many as you'd like, but you can see that we have all of the different parameters that you would need to make sure that that compliancy is here. We have 3 different types of options. You can have an approval process that requires approval whether that's out of policy or in policy, or you can just have notification sent. Again, whether you'd like that in policy or out of policy. From here, we then, also go down and we can also see that we have hotel and car areas there if we need that. Now I'm gonna go ahead and go in and book a flight today just so we can see the ease of booking a flight. And once I do that, I would just click on flights. Now as a coordinator, you can book oh, yes. If, Fran, I was just gonna chime in. I think I'm still seeing the initial first screen. So I'm not sure if we have the correct content coming through right now. I just I I wanted to to make sure we got that correct so that everyone saw sort of along the way. Yes. I've been switching screens. Alright. That's okay. Let me go back in. Let me show you the company setting screen. So we're gonna go back. Can everyone see this one? Yeah. Yep. The one. Okay. Okay. So here's our company settings then. This is where that supplier relations I was referring to. I'm gonna stop that one and show you the next screen then, which is going to be, let's see, let me go to this one. Okay. This is the main one. So this is where we'll go, and I'll go through and show you that travel policy screen where we had talked about and you did not see. Alright. So this is going to be the travel policy where you'll be able to go in and see all of the different, parameters that you would then want to set up. And you'll be able to do that for hotels, cars, everything, and this is where we are. Thank you, Matthew, for telling me that. Alright. Let's go in. Can we now see that I'm booking a flight? Sure can. Perfect. Alright. This is where we're gonna book a flight. And if you're booking on behalf of someone or someone that listed, if you have permissions to do so, you can do that. Otherwise, I'm just gonna go in and book a flight today, and we're gonna book a round trip, a one way, or multi city. If you have the saved address, it's going to default to that saved address, and then it's going to show you the closest once we get here, it's gonna show you the closest airports to where we're located. Now I'm gonna go in and just book some dates a little further out. You can go in and choose to open up all of the different filters. And then over here to the right, you'll have all of your unused tickets. If there's any to be used, It's gonna show you the airline, the amount, and the expiration date, and then we're just gonna click search. Now I, of course, like to look on the next page and do all of my filtering on the next page. Reason is is that I like to get the most robust options right off the bat. It's gonna show me my preferred vendors. It's going to show me the least expensive pricing right up front when I do that. Alright. So we're going from Los Angeles to Denver. You can see that we've got different amounts here. 1st class is going to be out of policy. You can choose to go in and and use your filters if you'd like. You can also pick a specific airport. You can change if we need to make any changes. We can then go in and select different options. Now with Southwest, you can choose all of your different options. We can go in and look at a seating map. Now if you've ever seen these seating maps, this gives you very much the detail that you're looking for. It's going to tell you if you're near the restrooms. It's going to tell you if you're over a wing. This is the preview of the seating. So if you there's a specific seat that you like to sit in, you'll be able to see that and then look to see what the cost is if you wanted to move forward in the cabin or the free seats. Now it also tells you if there's any connections or non stops, but for today's purposes, I'm going to show an out of policy. So we're gonna book a first class flight. And then on the return, I'm going to book Southwest on the on the return so you can see what that looks like as a mixed carriers. We also have all of the different carrier options here. Now we are we do do use, NDC, which is going to show the pricing that you would see on the airline would also be shown here. But I'm gonna go in and book a Southwest flight so we can see what that looks like if we're booking both of those. Yeah. Fran, I was gonna say, I know that we'd we'd started off talking about compliance and policy. I'm just curious. We we saw the poll question about how these things are paid for. Right? Like, what what happens if an employee books outside of policy, and how do we enforce that? Okay. We're gonna scroll down right here, and I'm going to show that. Thank you, Matthew. So we've got our early bird right here, and then we have our out of policy. So this is where you can put those compliance, based on the travel policy that you put in place. It does tell your travelers what is going to be out of policy and what we need to do in order to go ahead and have a lower fare. So it it really offers your your travelers alternate, options if they're available. So because we chose a a first class seat, there are going to be lower prices here, and we can go through. But I can also say, no. I don't want to do that, and I'm going to continue. Now if I continue, I will go in here, and I'm gonna actually back up real quick. Do you see right here where it says your savings are? The savings is because of that, Southwest booking. We were able to get a $6 savings on that. So it did say you're saving. Now if you had a negotiated rate on that United flight and we took the lowest fares available, it would increase that savings based on that amount. So that's always going to show you what your savings are at the time of booking. Alright. This is where we go through. The travelers will have the ability to put in their information. They'll have the ability to use an unused ticket if they need to and apply that here. I am going to take out this information though, and then, of course, if you have a known traveler number or any type of, redress numbers, you can enter those in. Options that you can opt into is you can have a mobile telephone number. You can opt in to get status alerts whenever you're traveling. And then this was the question about credit cards. So if you have a corporate card, you can put that in there. This would be the traveler's personal card. And then if we had a different card to be used, you can use that here. So this was the poll question about which cards you'd like to use. You have the options available in here. And then we have your billing tag. So if there's questions that you want answered, these are customizable. We can answer any of those. You could have 1. You could have 2. You can have all of these ones that you want. Alright. And this is where that outer policy comes into play. So, Matthew, as you were asking about compliancy, this is where the compliancy comes into effect. So this is where your travelers would have to provide a response. They would have to have an explanation. Alright. This information is then going to go into reporting. It is going to tell you the full amount and we're gonna click purchase. Now from here, you're going to be able to see that it would then go to your flights, your cars, and all of your information. You can then add your hotels, you can add your cars. Now if you don't know at the time that you need to add something, you can always come back at a later time, go in, add your hotels, add your cars, and associate it with this trip. Simply by clicking at the very top of the review screen, it will say, would you like to add this to this booking? Once that happens, it'll be here. What I am gonna do though is I'm gonna go into the reporting real quick, and I'm gonna show you what that looks like. So you have your company dashboard. You have all of the different options available. This is downloadable. It does tell you yourself booking in your c o two emissions if necessary, but the key here is that they do have that out of policy log and the compliancy log. We can also drill down to see the air tickets and all of the information necessary within your reporting. This is real time at your fingertips, so feel free to go in here at any time. You can click on any of this. Now you'll also be able to see some of the booking IDs. Alright. I'm gonna pause here for a moment. Matthew, was there anything else that we needed that you thought maybe we should see? No. I I I think you're hitting on everything so far, Fran. I I know for me, seeing the poll question earlier about ROI, be it compliance or cost savings, this is this is probably exactly what folks had banked on seeing. Perfect. I am gonna show you that you'll have your duty of care because that was also part of the poll questions, and and we did see some response there that the duty of care is important. You'll be able to see exactly where your travelers are in the world. You'll also have a list here. Now if you do have some meetings, you can run a par arrival departure list. And then also the unused tickets, very important. That savings is so important to know your unused tickets. We can push reports on a monthly basis to your travelers to let them know, but they have access to this unused ticket reports at all times. And then as the admins, they have you'll have access to everyone's information. You can go in and and see exactly what the total number is based on the carrier in a simple glance if that's what you're looking for. So we have all of that information. Now one last feature, we do have a meetings option that if someone from maybe human resources needs to send an invitation to maybe one traveler, for an interview, they can do that, or you can host as many people as you'd like. We've had as up to 20,000 people that can attend a gather meeting. So you would just simply add that meeting in and then send out invitations. Your travelers then would get an invitation that would look like this. They'd be able to go in. They can view their invitation, book their flights, or just say that they're attending. Fran, that that's one one thing for me. Obviously, again, we've worked together for years years, and I know when Gather was released, it it was a a big feature. I'm just curious, like, recent feature releases or in in anticipated innovation, what comes to mind when you think about some of the wow factors that Amtrak can offer? So some of the newer innovations that we have coming up is we are looking at, changing online. So having that same experience that you have directly with the carriers you'll have with Amtrak, Being able to change flights, you'll be able to go in, checking your options. Let's see if we needed to change this flight or both flights. We could go in and check to see oh, we have to say we that we've read this, and we can then check to see what the options are going to be. This information then brings you to the site that's going to tell you exactly what those change options are going to entail and what the cost would be associated. So this will help with the live chat, not having to reach out to an adviser maybe to ask the question of if I wanted to change this, what would those costs be? Now we are in demo site, so keep in mind that I apologize if it's oh, is it coming up? Yay. There oh, oh, it canceled. I ended up canceling it rather than doing a change. Okay. Well, you could have changed it if there was the change there, and it would have then given you the option. So that's upcoming. We also have the road map. The new view of hotels is upcoming. So it's going to be an easier look to it. Hotels is upcoming. So it's going to be an easier look to it, and that should be coming in q 1 or q 2. I'll just quickly show you what Chicago looks like. Alright. And as you saw, you can cancel very easily as well. So if we go in here and we go to the, to the look, you can now see that this look is, is going to let you scroll in and scroll out, but it then shows you how to get to the hotel. It the the, information is much clearer and the pricing is going to be here. Now, of course, it is looking and showing all of the different properties, but the new look is going to be very similar to this, but updated. It'll give you the overview, the room options, your amenities, reviews, and then you'll be able to scroll through just to see the different options. So we have more of this payment. There's some great new payment options that are are coming up in the future, and those are some of the bigger changes that we'll start to see on the site. Fantastic. Yeah. So we have a few questions. We have time for that right now. You'll probably wanna keep your screen shared, Fran, because I have a feeling that you probably wanted things. Okay. The first question is from Tanya. Can a company can a company code the travel to a department project number, cost center number, or chart of accounts line, while booking travel hotels, etcetera. I believe I can post it on the screen too so you can see it. Okay. So we can put billing tags in, which was, that these are the customizable where you can go in and you can edit those and or you can add new billing tags. So that's something that you can do. That's gonna be in the company settings, and this is where we add those. You can then put in and and set that up as a preset or a free form, and then you can have a drop down menu or you can choose to do, either way by adding, updating, or going from there. Does that answer that question? I believe so. And, actually, I think we have another one that kind of piggybacks off of that one. So from Valerie on the demo trip, I see a section called billing tags. Does this mean this employee can precode where this trip will be allocated to? Correct. Correct. Amazing. Alright. Let me scroll back through. Can you discuss some of the specific cost saving features that Amtrak offers? Sure. Well, specifically, your cost savings are going to be that's really going to be where, Amtrak negotiates on your behalf, 100 of thousands of hotels. You'll see those as the Amtrak rates. You'll also see that, the amp with the relationship manager, you'll be able to speak with the different carriers and applying for, contracts when when eligible. And then also when eligible for discounts on car rentals, and if you don't meet the the minimum thresholds on car rentals, Amtrak will be able to provide a discount rent build, through Enterprise National, Hertz, I believe, and I would check on others, but your relationship manager will help work with those. And then also the negotiated hotels directly that you have. So if you meet the minimum threshold for negotiated rate directly with a hotel, we'll be happy to reach out on your behalf and set up a negotiated rate at specific hotels. We can then list those as preferred to ensure that your travelers know which which airlines, hotels, and cars, are preferred for the 8 for your company. Alright. Let's see. We have from Christina. Does the interface does this interface with inverse expense management to tie travel preapprovals to travel purchases? So I think that could yeah. Go ahead, Fran. I mean, that's a math question. Yeah. Yeah. Question. How can you jump in here? It it absolutely does. And as you all know, Inverse has a number of expense solutions. Part of the benefit here is your itinerary will automatically flow over into your employees wallet where it's waiting to either be put onto an expense report or if there is some type of preapproval mechanism, it can be attached to that as well. Any other things you wanted to discuss about how AmTRAV, integrates and interfaces directly with, Ambers Expense Management, Matthew? Yeah. I would just say, part of the the really great, part of of the relationship here is you've got great visibility on both fronts. Whether it's in your expense tool by way of reporting and analytics, or directly in AmTrav as well. Part of what makes AmTrav really, really easy to position and partner with our customers is just that cohesive feeling from a a data visibility perspective. Fran, I don't know if it's if it's too last minute to to put you under the gun. But from a reporting standpoint, I know AmTrev has a lot of really great visibility and insights. If we don't get to cover that, I'm sure that's that's a great follow-up by them forever in attendance today. Well, we definitely have the reporting, the the, the instant the instant reports. I can't even think of the word. Sorry. But it's it's available as soon as something is booked, it can be done. Do we want me to go over into maybe showing some of the those reports? Let me share the screen once again. One moment. Alright. Here's my logo here. And I'm gonna just gonna go into reports once again so that we can take it just a little bit of deeper dive into those. So once we're here on report, we can go in and look at what the total was. So let's say you wanted to, see if that total trip is going to be for air spend. Oh, it's looking. Okay. So it's looking at the total trip and, the air spend right now. So what you'll be able to do is this is the spend report. So it's going to show you exactly how much everything was for the month previous, but you can go ahead and do a different customized the length of time, but you can also look at the booking date and the travel date. So being able to go in and customize the reporting to your needs, but then you can also look all of the different columns that are available, and you could adjust this to what you need. Being able to download these at any given time, you can print if necessary, and this will give you you needed to really look at one traveler. You can go in and look at one traveler's. You can do it for the last 12 months. You can do that for whatever time period is necessary. Now this is also nice to go into an air ticket report. This dives a little deeper into exactly what happens with the tickets. We will have the credit card reconciliation, anything that is the point of sale at Amtrak, which would be your airlines, any of your ancillary charges, oh, I had nothing go wrong. And then from there we can also go into your c o two. And I think I did it last 12 months, I needed to do that much sooner. But you can go into your c o two emissions just to see exactly where your emissions are going to be, if that's currently something that's important to you. And then we also have the ability to go in and really focus on that supply chain, whether that's the cars, the airlines, and this tells us oh, I think I did it again. I did it 12 months. One moment. Let me just do last month or the last month. So it's going to go through and it's going to tell you all of the different options here and how much you've spent over the last 12 months or the last month. I keep okay. Sorry about this. Doing last month. Get time. So we can demo site. Yeah. Yeah. We can do a follow-up, but with, I know we're out of time, but I did want to get 2 more questions in there. Otherwise, we will follow-up if they've already left. AmTrav works with Matthew. All of our And AmTrav works with all of our solutions. So we're gonna we're gonna work really well to, consult customers and make sure that it's the right fit for you. But assuming that it is, it's gonna integrate with our expense tool regardless of what platform you're on. And, this will probably be a follow-up, but I just want y'all to take this note away about schools that might use this tool to organize sports team travel. I'm assuming we have several customers. So that'll be a follow-up question as well as from Brad as well. Will this tie into our Imbursed certified credit card management account? Yes. You got it, Brad. Yep. Absolutely. But we will follow-up once again with everyone that asked questions throughout this lovely AMTRAV presentation with Imbursed. Thank you very much for joining. Don't forget to download any documents, that you might find useful and interesting. You can also watch the the webinar on demand. It'll be in your mailbox about 24 hours from now. So thank you once again for attending. Everyone have a wonderful day. Thanks all. Take care. Thank you, everyone.