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Overview of the Travel Agent

Streamline business travel with Payhawk's Travel Agent, from policy-compliant booking to auto payment, invoicing, and real-time updates.

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Written by Payhawk
Updated this week

The Travel Agent is a smart tool that streamlines every step of business travel: from policy-compliant flight and hotel booking to automatic payment, invoice generation, and real-time change handling.

It eliminates the back-and-forth that often frustrates travellers, office managers, and finance teams, and works seamlessly within communication channels like Slack.

Common challenges in business travel

Finance teams often face fragmented travel and expense processes, out-of-policy spending, and complex booking tools, which leads to inefficiencies and increased administrative work. The Payhawk Travel Agent solves addresses these challenges by enforcing company policies in real time and providing an intuitive booking experience within Slack. This ensures compliance and ease of use for both employees and finance teams.

Key functionalities

The Travel Agent helps streamline processes and improve efficiency in various cases.

Functionality

Capability

Enforcing company travel policies

  • Enforces company travel policies during the booking process.

  • Automatically applies card limits and funds availability.

  • Prevents out-of-policy spending and minimizes the need for manual post-trip corrections.

  • Ensures every trip is fully compliant before it takes place.

Offering an intuitive booking experience

  • Users select and confirm available flight and hotel options using natural language prompts.

  • The Agent tailors results based on individual user preferences and asks for any missing details through a seamless conversational experience.

  • The Travel Agent books the chosen flights and hotels directly within Payhawk.

  • Users receive real-time notifications about changes such as flight delays or cancellations.

Automatic payment and invoice generation

  • When the transaction with the airline or hotel is completed through Payhawk, the system automatically generates an invoice and attaches it to the corresponding expense within the system.

  • When the transaction is completed directly with the hotel or airline, they are the ones that provide the invoice.

How the Travel Agent works for Finance teams

By activating the Travel Agent, Finance teams can streamline travel management and improve compliance through:

  • Real-time policy enforcement during booking, ensuring all trips are within company guidelines.

  • Automated payments and invoice generation, with expenses instantly created and receipts attached, eliminating manual reconciliation.

  • Centralized visibility into travel spend, reducing out-of-policy expenses and simplifying month-end reporting.

How the Travel Agent works for employees

With the Payhawk Travel Agent, employees can easily book compliant business trips using their everyday tools like Slack. The Travel Agent guides users through the booking process using a simple conversational interface and allows them to search, select, and confirm flights and hotels with a few natural prompts.

To get started, employees must first authenticate and connect their Payhawk account, enabling Slack to access the Travel Agent. For more information, see the employee guide to setting up the Slack connection.

The Travel Agent allows employees to:

  • Book policy-compliant business travels directly in Slack without separate logins or training.

  • Use Payhawk cards for payment, with receipts and invoices automatically attached to expenses.

  • Receive real-time updates on booking confirmations, delays, or cancellations.

How the Travel Agent is activated by Payhawk administrators

For the Travel Agent to become active, Payhawk administrators need to:

  1. Enable the Travel Agent in Payhawk.

  2. Connect Payhawk to the communication channel so that employees can directly interact with the Agent through Slack.

Enabling the Travel Agent

The Travel Agent feature is available in Payhawk Labs. For more information, see the article on enabling and managing Beta features.

Providing feedback during Beta

To provide feedback on the Travel Agent, use either of the following methods:

How Payhawk processes your data for the Travel Agent

For more information about how Payhawk processes personal data for the Travel Agent feature, see the following resources:

Next steps

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