When you travel for work, you often want to add personal time to the trip: stay for the weekend, add a few days at the end, or fit in your own plans while you are there. Personal travel on Perk lets you book personal travel on the same platform you use for work and pay for it yourself, so it stays out of your company's accounting.
Your work travel and your personal trip stay separate. Your company books and sees your business travel as usual, while your personal trip is your own: booked by you, paid on your own card, and kept off your company's invoices, reporting, and budget. This article explains what a personal trip is, how you book and pay for it, and how it stays private and separate from your company.
In short: alongside your work travel, you can books flights, stays, trains, or cars as personal travel, add private companions when you want, pay on your own personal card, and keep it off your company's invoices, reporting, and budget.
Note: Personal travel is currently in beta phase and is available to a select group of customers.
What personal travel on Perk is
When you book personal travel, Perk creates a separate trip ID alongside your business trips. There's nothing new to set up: you use your usual work email and your existing Perk account, with no separate login.
Your personal travel stays separate from work travel in every way that matters. You check out separately and pay with your own card, and the booking doesn't go through your company's travel controls or spend product. You still see business and personal trips in one place, so you keep a single view without your personal travel entering company data.
Booking personal travel
You can start booking personal travel from the Perk home page:
- Go to Home and switch the toggle from Business to Personal.
- Pick the service you want and search. During the flow, a "personal" tag shows, so you know this is a personal search.
- Policies do not apply. Also, no approval is needed when booking personal travel.
- Add flights, stays, trains, or cars like they are used to when using the Perk platform. The Concierge service is only available for business travel.
- Add private companions (2 and older) if they want to travel together. To learn more, see Add private companions to personal travel.
- Premium fees, Flexi Travel fees, and Green Trip fees don't apply, and insurance can't be added to personal travel.
- Go to checkout to pay.
Personal search does not show inventory with corporate rates. Those rates are exclusive to business travel bookings. Aside from that, the traveler can book the same inventory as they can when booking business travel.
Paying for a personal trip
You pay for a personal trip on your own personal card. Corporate payment methods and business cards can't be selected. Your personal trip has its own checkout, separate from any business booking.
Follow these steps:
- Add everything you want to your personal trip.
- At checkout, select a personal card. If you have no personal card saved, add one through the add-card form. It is added as a personal card, available only for personal travel. No one else will see that card.
- Pay with your personal card to confirm the trip.
The personal payment step marks the card as personal, the price breakdown states the travel is paid personally rather than by the company, and checkout shows a reminder that this is personal travel. Company payment methods are not selectable for personal travel, and a personal card is not selectable to book business travel.
You receive a booking confirmation and receipt on your email, just like you'd do when booking business travel.
Caution: If an employee books personal travel and subsequently leaves the company, their access is not removed until that travel has taken place. Once the travel is past, the employee can be offboarded.
How your personal travel stays private and separate
Personal travel runs outside the company's travel controls: no travel policy or Policy AI, no approvals, and no cost objects or custom fields. It also stays out of company data. Personal travel does not appear in customer reporting, Spend, the ERP connector, or invoice collection, and it does not count toward subscription usage.
Business add-ons are excluded too: business vouchers, FlexiTravel, Green Trip, Premium, insurance, and Concierge do not apply to personal travel. Your personal card is hidden from the company admin.
For the full picture of how we keep personal travel private, see How personal travel stays private.