Question:

Optional: What additional insight has gone into your decision making process on this situation (i.e. what data are you capturing, what have you found to be realistic)?

Since most airlines are allowing two years for credits to be used instead of the typical year, this policy is valuable to us as for the foreseeable future, travel is not being allowed in our state. This restriction is not just due to COVID-19 but budget cuts as well.

Credits easier to track when our city cards are used; however, it is more problematic when people personally pay and request reimbursement.

The PA in the department is tasked with contacting the airlines to allow credits to be used for another employee when city cards are used (taxpayer funds etc.); some airlines have been very cooperative, others not so much.

When staff use their own cards and request reimbursement, they are reimbursed less the credit providing they had a properly approved travel authorization in place prior to booking the flight.

Currently we are keeping track by employee, department and expiry date of credit. Our fear is the credit may not be used as the City has stopped all travel and this may be permanent. Virtual system seems to be taking over more than attending anything in person.

We need to remind travelers they have credits to use as these are typically non-transferrable. Our travel company provides reminders when employees book directly with them and our on-line booking tool also provides users visibility into available credits. We shut down travel for months due to Covid so we have a volume of credits due to cancelled flights. We are now allowing employees to book flights for travel taking place in 2021 only (some exceptions for 2020) and issuing a company-wide memo reminding employees of available airline credits.

We have found airline credits to be given in employee name. We allow employees to buy the credits if they would like to, or we encourage using them for future business travel. Some go expired from non-use. I am interested to know if organizations using a travel management company are able to more easily transfer airline credits.

We already had measures in place to handle airline and event credits

With COVID, we had a lot of professional development opportunities and conference travel cancelled, so in order to avoid having too many cardholders have funds credited to personal travel funds, we requested that they get a credit from the airline that could be used by anyone at the institution in the future.

Mainly tracking credits by airlines. Once we are able to resume travel, the credits will be used by anyone who books travel. The credit will not be reserved just for the person whose name is on the credit

We will allow employees to pay our district for the credit if they do not plan on traveling in the next year for business. Airline vouchers are in employee names, so we found this to be a way to recover some of our loss. We do not expect or require employees to pay for the vouchers - just an option being offered.

This is the same as before the pandemic.

MyTravel analytics team is tracking the credits from the Credit Card and the unused tickets for future use.

We didn't have any issue with airline tickets. We had issues with third party vendors (Orbits) with hotel rooms not being credited back to us.

Very few of our cancelled travel plans had to be issued as credits because we fought to get refunds in full, which most airlines would accommodate. Since we are local government we don't want public funds sitting as credits with airlines. Established partnerships with airlines helped us get refunds over credits most of the times.

The department handling airline is allowing credits for future travel.

Most airlines are issuing credits to be used within either 12 or 24 months of ticket purchase; we are capturing this data via our spend program.

We rely on our TMC to provide us the data as well as the terms that are attached to each ticket purchase (refundable/non-refundable) and what options we have for using them(name change vs MCO).

Tracking of airline credits is done more at the department/location level.

We've asked our TMC to tie the specific waiver to each of our unused tickets on file for ease of use in the future.

We are also working with our airline partners on credits that do not qualify for COVID waivers to see if we can better use these credits for travel before they expire. The expiration date is tricky because all of the airlines have different policies and are constantly updating them as well. We have found that our TMCs are having to manually update the expiration on each, individual ticket in order to provide accurate reporting.

We have been refunded for 90% of our airline credits and hope to use the others at a later date.

Our Corporate Commercial Card Program does not provide airline credits, but the travel management company allows associates to enroll on Airline loyalty programs which provides similar benefits. The associates are very please with this benefit and many use the credits to book hotel and airline travel for vacations.

We look at the COVID-19 situation as one that will not be resolved quickly, therefore the management of these credits is irrelevant as business-related travel will continue to be forbidden for City employees until the situation changes dramatically. With the reduction in Sales Tax revenue coming into the City, the Training and Travel budget will remain non-existent.

We have left it up to the traveler in the past to use the credit. In the current environment we are making credits available to anyone in the company 6 months prior to expiration to ensure we use the credits.

Although we have a travel management company, staff are not required to use them. We reviewed travel associated with a travel start date of 3/1/20 or greater.

Airline CREDITS managed thru TMC for future use: $79k
Airline REFUNDS managed thru TMC: $43k
Airline REFUNDS pending: $1.5k

NON-TMC Airfare reimbursed to staff: $53k
Airline REFUNDS obtained: $11k in refunds
Airline CREDITS: $16k
Airline PENDING: $19k
Airline Travel Completed: $7k

The airlines waivers surrounding the credits allow us to apply the credits towards future travel with all rebooking fees waived. The credits managed by the TMC have an additional bonus of allowing free name changes.

Conference fees and hotels primarily resulted in refunds. There were a minimal amount of credits applied towards future events.