Go-live is the easy part. Adoption is the work.

It’s ninety days after go-live. The integrations ran clean, the steering committee had cake, and the project team has been reassigned. Then your AP manager pulls the first quarter of expense reports and finds a stack of airline tickets bought on personal cards at the airline’s own website, turned in for reimbursement three weeks after the trip, exactly the way it was done in the old system.

Nothing is broken. People just aren’t using it.

You’re in good company. In a 2025 survey of mid-market companies by the expense software firm Center, businesses with corporate booking tools admitted that 61 percent of employees go around them. And while 88 percent had a written travel policy, the biggest hurdle they reported wasn’t defiance. It was that people didn’t know the policy existed (49 percent) (Isaac M. O’Bannon, “Survey Shows Business Travel Bookings Remain Poorly Managed,” CPA Practice Advisor, February 3, 2025).

Here’s the problem underneath that scene. Go-live is a date, and dates respond to project plans. Adoption is a behavior, and in higher education you don’t get behavior by mandate. Faculty can’t be managed that way, and honestly, most of them have been booking their own travel since before your TMC existed. If you want them to change, you have to do something finance offices rarely do: market the program to the people who use it.

Measure two things, and leave hotels out of it

Before you market anything, decide what adoption means. I track two numbers: the share of airfare booked through the TMC (online tool or agent, both count), and the share of travel and expense (T&E) spend that lands on the university’s payment method instead of a personal card.

If the second number sounds like a nice-to-have, the corporate world is fighting the same fight. In a poll of 70 travel buyers at a GBTA event, 22 percent of programs still allowed personal credit cards and 18 percent still allowed cash. The authors’ fix wasn’t a stricter rule. It was a traveler-focused communication campaign (Greg Toussaint, Edgar, Dunn & Company, “Future-proof your corporate travel payments strategy: why payment methods matter,” Advito, undated).

I don’t track hotel bookings through the TMC, and I’d talk you out of it. In the programs I’ve worked in, conference travel often runs around 60 percent of university travel, and the only way to get the conference room-block rate is to book through the conference’s own link. A hotel metric punishes your travelers for doing the right thing.

Air needs one honest carve-out too. Universities do research in places the booking sites don’t serve: the regional carrier into a remote field station, the charter to the ice. Give those trips their own exception reason and take them out of the denominator.

Here’s the test to run this week. Pull 90 days of expense lines coded to airfare. Split them two ways: university-paid versus out-of-pocket, and matched to a TMC booking versus not. Then sort by department. That’s your baseline, and your short list of departments where the marketing should start.

Build an advisory group before you need one

Adoption starts months before go-live, with who’s in the room. Build an advisory group of campus representatives, and the more who are willing to participate, the better. I want the people in every department, unit and school who support travelers with booking and expense reports; the financial officers who care about controls; and, if they’re willing, a few frequent travelers.

Recruit from large and small departments on purpose. A college with a six-person business office and a department where one administrator does everything have very different staffing models, and your program needs a lot of both consistency and flexibility. Recruit across travel cultures too: athletics team travel, athletics recruiting, fundraising, research and grants, study abroad, professional development, conferences, and the list goes on. Each one is its own country.

Then bring them the decisions as the implementation produces them. Sometimes you bring a decision already made and explain why. Sometimes you ask what the best decision would be and take their guidance. Say which one it is. People forgive being told; they don’t forgive being asked for show.

The payoff is significant. These people are part of the process, so you’re earning buy-in before you deploy instead of asking for it after. Every implementation makes a few choices that look unintuitive from the outside, and they’re the ones who can explain to a colleague why it was done that way. Then, when the system is ready, put them in testing. You’ll find issues and get feedback from real usage, and without calling it training, you’ve trained a group of subject matter experts who are already out on campus, supporting their neighbors, the day you go live.

Sell what the traveler gets, not what the policy says

Lead with empathy. Nobody travels or buys on the university’s behalf for fun. The trip is often an inconvenience, and the expense report afterward is an administrative chore no one likes. When TravelPerk surveyed 4,000 business travelers, 83 percent said they struggle with trip expenses, 26 percent were putting large purchases on personal cards, and 28 percent had waited on late reimbursements (TravelPerk press release, “83% of employees struggle with travel expenses,” June 4, 2025). So listen first, and when it’s your turn to talk, be brief. A program office that hears people out and answers in two sentences earns more adoption than any campaign.

“Policy requires it” has never once changed a professor’s mind. A specific benefit to them, their trip, or their grant does. These are the ones I lead with.

You’re not alone when the trip falls apart. A cancelled connection at 11 p.m. is a phone call to an agent who already has the itinerary, not two hours in a rebooking line.

You never float the university a loan. Airfare goes on the university’s card or central account, the transactions import into SAP Concur, Emburse or Workday on their own, and most of the data entry is done before the traveler opens the report. No reimbursement request, because there’s nothing to reimburse, except maybe meal per diems or mileage claims. Put the card in the traveler’s phone wallet as well; the same Advito piece notes that people who already pay by phone use the corporate card more when it lives there, and that a virtual card sent to a wallet covers the new hire or job candidate who travels before the plastic arrives.

You get perks you can’t get booking direct. UC San Diego publishes its list for travelers, and it’s a good model: preferred boarding, frequent-flier status match, free rental-car upgrades, hotel discounts up to 20 percent, and instant Marriott Silver status (“Travel Program Benefits,” UC San Diego Blink, updated May 5, 2026).

Your grant gets money back. The same page reports that in fiscal 2023–24, automated fare monitoring re-priced 400 tickets for $51K in savings, and 577 unused nonrefundable tickets were put back to work for $202K. To a principal investigator, that isn’t program savings. That’s a graduate student’s conference trip. The University of Michigan told its campus to expect 2 to 10 percent off most flights, averaging 4 percent (Tim George, “Requirement to use CTP for UM-related flights coming July 1,” The University Record, April 15, 2025).

The compliance work happens at booking. Fly America gets checked before the ticket is issued instead of after the cost is disallowed, and the trip is registered for the university’s travel insurance and emergency support without a separate form.

Make the policy easy to find and easy to understand. If the answer to “can I pay for a seat upgrade on a nine-hour flight?” lives on page 14 of a PDF, the traveler will guess; in that same TravelPerk survey, nearly one in five travelers didn’t know what was reimbursable. Plain language, one place, searchable. This is also a good job for AI: an assistant trained on your own policy that answers that question at 10 p.m. and links to the section it came from. That same UC San Diego page already points travelers to the campus assistant, TritonGPT, for immediate help. The corporate TMCs are betting on the same thing: Trip.Biz just launched four AI agents aimed squarely at adoption and claims conversational booking cuts the average booking from 45 minutes to two (Michael B. Baker, “Trip.Biz Adds AI Agents Aimed at Boosting Program Adoption,” Business Travel News, September 17, 2026). That’s a vendor’s number, but the logic holds. Every minute of friction you remove is adoption you don’t have to market for. A word of realism, though. When Serko and Sabre surveyed 300 U.S. travel managers, 52 percent said their AI tools had exceeded expectations, but 46 percent named technical complexity as a barrier (Abby Crotty, “AI drives cost savings in corporate travel, despite implementation challenges,” PhocusWire, April 1, 2025). The other catch is that AI repeats whatever your policy says, so fix the contradictions left over from 2017 first.

One caution from that Michigan article. In the public comments, an interim department chair noted that the announcement went to chairs and didn’t ask them to pass it on and wondered how other faculty would hear about it. That’s no knock on anyone. An email signed by three executive vice presidents is still an email.

Reach faculty where they already are

Faculty are the hardest audience on campus, and they don’t come to training. So go to them.

My favorite technique is what I call the white glove approach. Pick five to ten faculty members or senior leaders on campus who show up at gatherings and whose opinions travel: the senate chair, the PI with the forty-person lab, the one everybody copies when they complain. Sit down with each of them one-on-one for thirty minutes, with their phone and their next real trip. Install the app. Book the flight. Snap a receipt. Approve a report. Leave them a direct number. They’ll do your marketing at the next department meeting, and they’ll do it better than you can, because nobody suspects them of working for finance.

Then keep showing up in small ways. Ask for five minutes on a standing department meeting agenda instead of scheduling an hour nobody attends. Put the card application or a QR code link to where they can apply and the app download into new faculty orientation, before the first trip sets the habit. Set up next to the coffee cart with a QR code and an offer to buy the coffee. Brief the department administrators first, because faculty ask them before they ask you.

Use humor; it’s the only thing that survives an inbox. I like opening with the Seinfeld rental-car scene, where they know how to take the reservation but not how to hold it, because everyone in the room has lived it. And with permission, tell real rescue stories. “Rebooked from Frankfurt in eleven minutes” beats any slide I’ve ever built.

To retain attention, send things people want to open. “You have an unused ticket credit worth $412” gets read. A one-screen quarterly scorecard to each dean, showing their departments’ two numbers and the dollars returned to their funds, gets forwarded.

What good looks like

Good isn’t 100 percent, and anyone who promises that hasn’t met your anthropology department. At institutions where this is working, air through the TMC settles at 85 percent or better after the remote-research exceptions, and the university payment method carries 80 percent or more of T&E spend. Just as telling is what you overhear: a faculty member telling a new colleague the process is “much better,” unprompted.

This is the communications and training work I build into every implementation and optimization, because the project plan ends at go-live and the program doesn’t.

Sources

Tim George, Finance Communications. “Requirement to use CTP for UM-related flights coming July 1.” The University Record, University of Michigan, April 15, 2025, including public reader comments dated May 9, 2025. record.umich.edu

Abby Crotty. “AI drives cost savings in corporate travel, despite implementation challenges.” PhocusWire, April 1, 2025. phocuswire.com

Isaac M. O’Bannon. “Survey Shows Business Travel Bookings Remain Poorly Managed.” CPA Practice Advisor, February 3, 2025. cpapracticeadvisor.com

TravelPerk (now Perk). “Latest research: 83% of employees struggle with travel expenses, with 1 in 4 business travelers taking the financial strain themselves.” Press release (no author listed), June 4, 2025. travelperk.com

Greg Toussaint, Director, Edgar, Dunn & Company. “Future-proof your corporate travel payments strategy: why payment methods matter.” Advito (no publication date shown). advito.com

Michael B. Baker. “Trip.Biz Adds AI Agents Aimed at Boosting Program Adoption.” Business Travel News, September 17, 2026. businesstravelnews.com

University of California San Diego. “Travel Program Benefits.” Blink (no author listed), last updated May 5, 2026. blink.ucsd.edu