A corporate travel request form for Pakistan car and airport bookings

A corporate travel request form that works for Pakistan ground transport needs about a dozen fields that most flight-first templates leave out: the arriving flight number and airport, the exact passenger count, the number and size of bags, the vehicle class, every stop in order, expected waiting time, and whether the car is needed for a transfer or for a full day. Those are the items that change what a car costs and which vehicle can do the job. Add a cost centre, a named budget holder and a single “trip owner” who speaks for the whole journey, and you have a request that can be quoted once, approved once and handed to a supplier without three rounds of follow-up emails.

Below: the fields, a routing rule for multi-department trips, and a layout you can copy.

Why a flight-centric form fails for ground transport

Most internal templates were built around airline tickets and hotel rooms. Dates, destination, purpose and approver are enough to price a London to Islamabad return. They are nowhere near enough to price the car that meets the traveller.

A car quote in Pakistan moves with things a flight booking never asks about:

• Where the pickup actually is. Islamabad International Airport is about 25 km from both Zero Point in Islamabad and Saddar in Rawalpindi, near Fateh Jang in Attock District, according to its Wikipedia entry. “Islamabad pickup” is therefore not one price. A hotel in the Blue Area and a factory on the far side of Rawalpindi are different jobs.
• How many people and how much luggage. Four passengers with four large cases will not fit in a saloon. The request needs both numbers, not just a headcount.
• What the car does after the drop. A single transfer, a half day of meetings and a car held for an evening dinner are three different bookings.
• Stops and waiting. A detour to collect a colleague in Rawalpindi on the way to Lahore adds distance and time; a two-hour site visit adds waiting.

When those facts are missing, the supplier either guesses (and the quote changes later) or asks (and the request sits in an inbox). The fix is not a longer form. It is the right fields in the right order.

The mandatory fields that change the price and the vehicle

Treat these as required. If a requester cannot fill one, the request is not ready to send.

Journey fields

1. Service type. Airport arrival, airport departure, point-to-point transfer, intercity, or car and driver by the hour or day. This one choice decides how everything below is priced.
2. Pickup address and drop-off address. Full addresses, including building, gate or site entrance. For airports, name the airport and terminal where the airport has more than one.
3. Date and local pickup time. State the time zone. Pakistan Standard Time is the default, but a requester sitting in the UK or the Gulf will often write their own local time without noticing.
4. Stops in order. Each stop as an address, with an expected dwell time. “Stop at the Lahore office for about 45 minutes” is a usable instruction; “may need to stop” is not.
5. Return leg. Yes or no, and if yes, the same detail again. Do not assume the return mirrors the outbound.

Arrival fields

6. Flight number and scheduled arrival time. This matters more than any other airport field. A flight number lets the dispatcher follow the actual landing time instead of the time on the ticket. Without it, a delayed flight turns into unplanned waiting, and unplanned waiting is where airport costs creep up.
7. Arrival airport. ISB for Islamabad, LHE for Lahore’s Allama Iqbal International, KHI for Karachi’s Jinnah International. Karachi’s main terminal splits into an international and a domestic concourse, and Hajj flights use a separate terminal, per its Wikipedia entry. Lahore also has a Hajj terminal beside the Allama Iqbal terminal. A group returning from Umrah or Hajj may not come out where a business traveller would.
8. Passenger contact on arrival. A mobile number that will work on landing, plus a note on whether the traveller uses WhatsApp. A UK number on roaming is fine if the traveller has roaming switched on; say so.

Load fields

9. Passenger count. Adults and children separately. Child seats are a separate request, not an assumption.
10. Bag count and type. Large checked cases, cabin bags, and anything awkward: sample cases, exhibition stands, equipment boxes, golf bags. Our guide to how many people and suitcases actually fit in each Pakistani fleet vehicle is the quickest way to check whether a request for “a sedan” is realistic.
11. Vehicle class. Economy saloon, executive saloon, SUV, van or coaster. If the requester has a preference for a specific class, record the reason (a senior visitor, security guidance from the client, a long intercity day). A reason makes it easier for an approver to accept a higher class without a separate conversation.

Time fields

12. Expected waiting. Total minutes or hours the car will stand while the passenger is inside a meeting, a factory or a wedding hall. Hourly and daily hire already assume some waiting; transfers usually do not.
13. Latest acceptable finish. For a day hire, the time the driver can be released. A day that runs well into the night is a different booking from one that ends at six.

Cost centre, budget holder and the trip owner

The commercial fields are where multi-department requests usually go wrong. Three people are involved, and the form should name each one separately.

Alongside the names, capture:

• Cost centre code and, where relevant, a project or client code for rebilling.
• Purchase order number if your finance team issues POs for services.
• Budget ceiling for the trip, so the approver sees at a glance whether the quote fits.
• Invoice entity: which legal entity the invoice should be addressed to. A group with a UK parent and a Pakistani subsidiary has two candidates, and month-end is a bad time to find the wrong one was billed.
• Business purpose in one sentence. UK employers that provide or reimburse travel have tax, National Insurance and reporting obligations, set out in HMRC’s guidance on travel and subsistence expenses. A clear purpose line makes those later decisions easier for whoever handles payroll and expenses; it is not a substitute for their advice.

A travel request approval workflow for several departments

The classic failure, as a hypothetical: sales asks for a car to collect a visiting director at Lahore airport. Operations asks for a car to take the same director to the Sheikhupura plant the next morning. Finance asks for an airport drop two days later. Three department travel requests, three approvers, three suppliers, possibly three cars waiting at the same hotel.

A simple routing rule prevents most of it:

1. The traveller decides the trip, not the department. Every request is keyed to the traveller’s name and travel dates. When a new request arrives, the travel desk (or whoever holds the form) checks whether an open trip already exists for that person in that window.
2. The first department to submit becomes the trip owner unless the traveller’s own line manager claims it. That department holds the relationship with the supplier for the whole visit.
3. Other departments submit legs, not trips. Operations adds “day two, hotel to plant and back” as a leg on the existing trip, with its own cost centre attached to that leg only.
4. Each leg carries its own cost centre, so the single invoice can be split cleanly afterwards. One booking, several codes.
5. Each budget holder approves only their own legs. No approver signs off another department’s spend, and nobody waits for an approver who has nothing to do with their leg.

This keeps approval proportionate: a department adding a two-hour local transfer does not re-approve a five-day programme. If two legs clash, such as two cars for overlapping hours with the same passenger, the trip owner decides.

Merging overlapping requests into one booking

Merging is where a good form pays for itself. Once requests are keyed to the traveller, overlaps become visible and can be combined.

Look for three patterns:

• Back-to-back legs on the same day. An airport pickup at 10:00 and a meeting run at 14:00 may be cheaper and simpler as a single day hire than as two transfers with an empty car in between. Ask the supplier to price both ways.
• Several travellers on the same flight. Two colleagues landing on the same flight from Dubai do not need two cars if the bag count allows one vehicle, even if they were requested by different teams.
• Repeated local legs across several days. Three days of hotel-to-office runs can often be quoted as a multi-day car and driver, which also gives the traveller the same driver throughout.

When you merge, keep the leg-level cost centres, and tell every requester their leg now sits inside a merged booking, so no one books a duplicate “just in case”.

An illustrative example

Example only, to show the mechanics. A visitor lands at Islamabad on a Monday morning. Business development requests an airport pickup to a hotel in Islamabad. Engineering requests a Tuesday day trip from Islamabad to a site near Jhelum and back. Human resources requests a Wednesday evening drop at the airport. On a merged form this becomes one trip with three legs and three cost centres, a single trip owner in business development, and one supplier conversation.

Deadlines before travel

There is no official lead time for ground transport. What follows is an internal policy suggestion, built around how long approval and confirmation realistically take, not a supplier rule. Set your own and publish them on the form so requesters know where they stand.

Publish a “late request” route too; late requests will happen. And link the form to your supplier’s written terms. For iDrive bookings that means the iDrive cancellation policy, which the trip owner should read before approving changes close to travel.

Safety and duty-of-care fields you should not skip

A request form for Pakistan has to carry a little more than a form for a domestic UK trip. The UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office publishes safety and security advice for Pakistan that advises against all travel to some areas and all but essential travel to others, including parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. It tells travellers to avoid street taxis, e-taxis and online taxi apps, and to use reputable, licensed companies where you call and the operator assigns the driver. It also names business travellers among the British nationals terrorists see as legitimate targets.

That has three consequences for the form:

• A destination check. Add a required tick box: “I have checked the destination against current FCDO advice.” If any leg goes into an area the FCDO advises against, the request should route to whoever owns travel risk in your organisation, not straight to a budget holder. Our own guidance does not override the FCDO position, and we do not suggest leisure travel into those areas.
• Named driver and vehicle before travel. The request should ask the supplier to confirm, in writing, the driver’s name, vehicle and registration before the traveller departs. The form can hold a field for these once confirmed.
• A second contact. An in-country host or office contact the dispatcher can reach if the traveller’s phone is off after landing.

Advice changes. Link the live FCDO page from your form rather than copying its wording into a policy that nobody updates.

A ground transport booking request template you can copy

This layout is designed to be pasted into whatever your organisation already uses: a spreadsheet, a Microsoft or Google form, an intranet page or the travel section of an expenses tool. Required fields are marked. Keep the order; it follows the way a dispatcher reads a job.

Keep personal data to what the job needs. A driver needs a name and a number, not a passport scan. Our sister service Pakistan Taxi, part of the iDrive network, has a practical guide to combining an airport pickup with business meetings that shows how a request like this turns into a day on the ground.

From approved request to a confirmed car

An approved form is still only a request. The last step is turning it into something the traveller can rely on.

1. Submit the whole trip, not the first leg. Send the merged request with every leg, so the supplier can price it as one programme. On iDrive you can send a journey request with the full itinerary; a company that books regularly should create an account so requests, confirmations and invoices sit in one place.
2. Read the quote against the form. Check the vehicle class, the waiting allowance, the stops and the return leg. If the quote assumes something the form did not say, correct it now.
3. Approve the quote, not just the request. The budget holder signed off a request with a ceiling. If the quote comes in above it, it goes back for approval. Quotes are subject to supplier confirmation and availability, so do not tell the traveller a car is booked until the confirmation arrives in writing.
4. Send the confirmation to the traveller and the second contact. Driver name, vehicle, registration, meeting point and a contact number.
5. Close the loop after travel. Record any waiting or changes against the right leg and cost centre before the invoice arrives, while people still remember what happened.

For organisations moving staff or visitors regularly, the iDrive business travel car service page explains how account bookings are handled.

Questions people ask

What is the single most important field on a corporate travel request form for Pakistan?

For airport jobs, the flight number. It lets the dispatcher follow the real landing time, which is what keeps waiting under control. For everything else, the full pickup address, including gate or terminal.

Should each department have its own business trip request form?

No. Use one form and key every request to the traveller and dates. Departments add legs to an existing trip, each with its own cost centre, so one booking can still be split correctly on the invoice.

Who should approve a merged multi-department trip?

Each budget holder approves only the legs charged to their cost centre. The trip owner coordinates changes on the day but does not approve other departments’ spend.

Can the approved request be treated as a confirmed booking?

No. Approval authorises the spend. A booking exists only when the supplier confirms the vehicle and driver in writing, and availability is never guaranteed until then.