A travel registry built from the tickets themselves
Most universities ask faculty and staff to register international travel, and most registries depend on the traveller remembering to fill in a form. The trips that matter most, a conference added late or a research visit extended into a neighbouring country, are the ones a form misses.
TripDesk365 builds the record from the booking: the airline's own confirmation, read into a trip with every flight, every destination country and its State Department level. It works alongside the travel agency or booking tool your institution already requires.
How trips get into the registry
- Travellers or department travel administrators forward the airline's confirmation or e-ticket receipt to your institution's private TripDesk365 address, which can be changed at any time. Mail judged to be spam or a virus, or that fails sender authentication, is not accepted.
- The email waits in the Inbox, with up to three of its PDF or image attachments. A member of your team imports it: Smart Import reads the confirmation into a draft trip, and the person checks every flight before saving it.
- A confirmation for a trip already in the registry is recognised by its record locator or ticket number, so a forwarded duplicate never becomes a second trip. A later email that names a saved trip by its record locator has its PDF and image attachments filed on that trip. An email never changes a trip's flights by itself, so a schedule change is checked by a person.
Emails nobody imports are deleted after 30 days. TripDesk365 records flights only, not hotels or ground transport.
Level 3 and Level 4 trips, seen before they leave
Many institutions send travel to a Level 3 or Level 4 country to an international travel or risk committee before it goes ahead. The committee can only review trips it knows about. In TripDesk365:
- Every trip lists each country it lands in, connections included, with its State Department level and a link to the Department's advisory.
- When the Department raises a country's level, staff who turned on browser alerts are told if trips land there in the next 60 days, which is when a trip approved under one level needs another look.
- A calendar shows every departure in the month, a directory shows each traveller's next departure, and a map shows flights departing, in the air and just landed, with live positions where flight data has them.
- Each traveller's emergency contact is kept with the trip and on their profile, for the people whose role may read contact details.
The review itself is your institution's. Our high-risk travel approval checklist sets out what committees commonly ask for at each level.
Evidence for the Fly America Act
Travel paid with federal money, grants included, generally has to use US airlines, and a flight operated by a foreign airline counts only when it is ticketed under the US airline's code and flight number. Whether a ticket shows that is the first thing a post-award review checks.
- Each imported flight keeps both the airline whose code and flight number were sold and, when different, the airline that operates it. The itinerary shows "operated by" beside the flight.
- The flight-by-flight export has an "Operated by" column, so a review of a grant's travel can sort out every codeshare in one pass.
- The e-ticket receipt can be attached to the trip, where it is stored encrypted, so the evidence and the record stay together.
- A grant or award number on every booking ties each flight to the award it was charged to.
TripDesk365 shows what the ticket says. It does not decide whether a trip complies, which depends on the award, the funding agency and the exceptions that apply: your sponsored programs office decides that. Our Fly America Act checklist sets out the rules and the records to keep.
Grant, department and project codes
Universities account for travel by department, by grant and often by project. Set up booking fields for each, as lists or free text, required where your rules require them. A missing code is flagged on the booking, a value can be corrected after the trip, and a closed grant is archived, never deleted, so its trips keep their code.
Flight emissions per department
A campus climate action plan usually counts business travel among its indirect emissions, and the hardest part is getting the flights. TripDesk365 estimates the CO₂e of every flight it holds, and the emissions report totals it per department, per grant or per any other booking field, for any period up to 400 days, with and without the non-CO₂ effects of flying at altitude, as a CSV with the method stated. Trips without a department are a row of their own, so the departments add up to the institution's total.
The method is great-circle distance times the UK government's 2025 conversion factors for each flight's haul and cabin; try it on our flight emissions calculator.
For the traveller
Faculty get something back for forwarding their ticket: an itinerary by email, a calendar file with every flight, and a private trip link with local times at every airport, each destination's advisory level and a link to the State Department's entry requirements for US passport holders. The link never shows the record locator or ticket numbers, so it can be shared with family, and it stops working 30 days after the last flight.
What TripDesk365 does not do for universities
- It is not a booking tool here: it records trips booked through the agency or tool your institution requires, and does not search fares.
- It does not manage study abroad applications, student programmes, or travel insurance.
- It has no approval step for imported trips: your committee's review happens in your own process.
- It does not provide 24-hour assistance or track travellers' locations.
Bring a department's trips
Forward us a few e-tickets from one department before the demo. We will build its registry, show you the advisory levels and codeshares, and cut the emissions report by grant.