About Policy Groups and Policies

You use Universal Policy to create individual policies for air, car, and hotel. For each policy, you define rules about what constitutes an in-policy or out-of-policy booking. Policy is then applied to users through policy groups. For a policy group, you attach one each of an air, car, and/or hotel policy. Each policy group can have one of each type of policy, or only some of each type of policy (for instance, air and car policy but no hotel policy).

You search for, add, and manage policy groups on the Policy Groups screen. After you create or select a policy group, you can attach air, car, and hotel policies as well as reason codes to it. These individual policies are created as standalone policies that can be applied to travelers only by being attached to a policy group.

After policy groups are set up, travelers can then be added to the appropriate account or traveler group depending on their position in the company. This last task would be performed not within Universal Policy but as travelers are added in the company’s online booking tool.

Note: You can have multiple policy groups, for instance, one for VIPs, one for General Employees, and another for Contractors.

The following diagram illustrates how policy groups could be set up in Universal Policy.

For example, you can create an air policy and attach it to one or more of the policy groups. As per the diagram, there may be several policy groups under an account (Corporate Customer) or traveler group.

For example, the difference between the policy groups may be only the hotel policy. Therefore, you would need to create only one air and car policy and attach these to each of the policy groups. You could then create two or more hotel policies and attach them to the appropriate policy groups. You can reduce the number of policy settings that you need to create by sharing what is common across policy groups and building specific policies for policy groups only where they differ from each other.

Policy Reference

Note that when you create a policy group, a Policy Reference appends to the uProfile of the account (or traveler group) that you are working on. An indicator is stored with this reference to show whether it is the default. When the agent is retrieving a traveler profile, if there is no Policy Reference associated with the traveler, the agent can navigate up the uProfile hierarchy and determine which Policy Reference to apply.