Travel Funding #

Booking Travel #

This is a highly regulated process, because the university has obtained exclusive contracts with travel companies. You have two choices for booking your travel.

Important: In either case, you should keep your e-tickets, boarding passes, train tickets, hotel vouchers and bills, etc., and submit them all to the Institute’s accountant for possible future auditing purposes.

Use Carson Wagonlit Travel #

This is the preferred option, because it’s easier, and also saves you from having to advance the money for the tickets yourself.

There are two ways to do this.

1. CWT Online System. This is easier if you have to book lots of travel, but it requires you to first set up your account. In order to do that, follow the instructions at this page on the ADFI intranet. Make sure to use your UCLouvain e-mail address.

   Once you have an active account, you just need to go to https://www.mycwt.com/ and click on “Traveler login” at the top right. Once you log in, you’ll be presented with a pretty normal interface that walks you through booking air travel, train travel, or hotels.

2. By e-mail. You can also write the travel agency directly at team1.ucl.be@contactcwt.com, including (1) the name of the traveler, (2) the destination and times requested, (3) the account number (including all of the optional account number parts). As always, if you don’t have an account number, contact me.

Confirm your itinerary when you receive it, and the payment will be taken care of automatically by the university (you don’t have to pay in advance!). This will also automatically get you corporate-rate Thalys, Eurostar, and Lufthansa-group tickets.

Buy Tickets Yourself #

You are welcome to book your own travel, but you must get three quotes for three different itineraries and take the lowest available price. This theoretically applies to hotels as well, but for hotels it’s much easier to justify not offering three competing quotes (you can explain that you selected on the basis of location, being the official conference hotel, etc.).

Reporting Absences #

For insurance and bookkeeping purposes, you must report your travel to the Institute ahead of time. This ensures that your insurance is correctly handled (in the event that you get sick or injured while abroad, if this occurs during a trip for work, it’s the university that will be responsible for paying for your expenses), and that your being gone has been registered with HR.

This procedure now takes place entirely online. Go to your UCLouvain intranet page, where you should find a button labelled “Mon dossier RH.” (If it’s not there, you can add it by clicking “Ajouter un widget.”) Then, click on “Mission” in the top navigation bar, and click on “Mission à l’étranger.” Fill in and submit the form, and all notifications will be taken care of automatically.

Please respect the deadlines: for normal travel of less than one month, this form should be submitted eight days before you depart. For travel of more than one month, or to a “red zone,” this should be submitted three weeks before you depart. To find out if you are traveling to a red zone, visit the French foreign ministry’s website (lol), click on the country you’re visiting on the world map, click on the “Securité” tab, and scroll down until you see the map of the country concerned, which will be color coded in green/yellow/red.