Approval concepts

Companies use approval processes to ensure that travel bookings comply with their travel policies. The approval process ensures that an assigned approver is notified when bookings occur and is prompted to act when policies are violated. The Spotnana platform supports this approval process and provides APIs to obtain the approval data and process the booking approvals (i.e., approve or decline the booking).

Approval process

The approval process includes the following steps.

Traveler creates a booking on Spotnana (e.g., an air booking).
An approval type is identified (based on the relevant company policy).
The approval request is sent (via email) to the traveler’s assigned approver in the company.
The approver reviews the request and either approves or declines the booking before the approval deadline expires.
If the booking is approved, it will be finalized and ticketed on the platform. If the approver denies the request, the booking will be canceled.

Core concepts

The following are some core concepts you'll want to be familiar with when working with the Approval APIs.

Approval data

The approval data (i.e., the approvalDataList object in the API response) consists of such information as the approvalId, status, approval type, approvers, and approval deadline along with the relevant booking information. The booking information will include the pnrId, PNR summary, PNR type, tripId, companyId, and the out-of-policy indicator.

Types of approvals

The following types of approvals can be assigned to bookings:

Soft approval: For a soft approval, if the approver hasn't responded to the approval request before the approval deadline, the booking will automatically be approved and processed. However, if the approver declines the approval, the booking will be canceled.
Hard approval: The booking will only be processed if the approver approves the request. If the approver declines the request or does not take any action before the approval deadline, the booking will be canceled.
Passive approval: The booking doesn’t require any approval to proceed. It will be processed as soon as the traveler creates it. However, the approver will receive notification of the booking.

Approval statuses

Approval requests may be assigned one of the following statuses.

Approved: The booking has been approved by the approver.
Denied: The booking has been denied by the approver.
Approval pending: The approval for the booking is still pending. The approver hasn’t responded yet.
Auto approved: The booking has been approved automatically. This happens for soft approvals if the approver hasn’t responded to the request before the approval deadline. This will also occur immediately for passive approvals.
Auto denied: The booking has been denied automatically. This happens for hard approvals if the approver hasn’t responded to the request before the approval deadline.

Approval deadline

Every booking approval provides a deadline for the approver to respond to the traveler’s booking request (i.e., approve or decline the booking). The approvalVoidDeadline field in the response (contained in the endpoints in the list approval data workflow) will contain the deadline.

If the approval deadline expires and the approver hasn’t yet responded to the request yet, the status of the request will be updated as follows:

For soft approvals: The approval status is changed to AUTO_APPROVED and the booking is processed on the platform.
For hard approvals: The approval status is changed to AUTO_DECLINED and the booking is canceled.

Note: For passive approvals, the deadline will not have any impact and the booking will be automatically approved. These approval types are merely a notification for the approver.