10 A Travel Request must be prepared and approved by the Travel Approver, any time when duty travel is undertaken for the Organization, or when the traveller is representing the Organization even if the travel is not paid for by the Organization.
20 The Travel Request must only reflect the official itinerary.
30 The maximum travel duration on a single Travel Request cannot exceed one year, from first departure date until final travel date.
40 To enhance planning and facilitate cheaper flight tickets, Travel Requests for international duty travel by air for staff must be fully approved not later than 14 calendar days before the date of departure, except when travel is organized in response to a recognised emergency event/programme.
50 Travel Requests for non-emergency travel, not included in the Travel Plan, must be justified in writing and approved by the Travel Plan owner (Director at Headquarters and Regional Offices, Head of WHO Offices for country offices, and approval attached to the Travel Request.
60 Staff duty travel must have 2 levels of approval: (i) the staff member’s
supervisor and (ii) the project budget owner, who may delegate the approval if absent
from the office. A staff member should not carry out both the supervisor and project budget owner approvals of his/her own Travel Request. Instead Travel Request should be reassigned to another staff with appropriate approver rights in GSM.
70 When an approved Travel Request is changed/amended, the revised version must be either resubmitted and approved or reverted to previous approved version, prior to the travel start date.
80 For travel within the same country, when destinations cannot be predicted in advance, a single blanket Travel Request (TR) may be issued for a maximum period of 3 months.
81 The blanket Travel Request (TR) will be issued mentioning the country name only as destination without city information (e.g. From India to India). The elsewhere per diem rate for the country will be used, unless otherwise agreed. (See also chapter VII.5.9: para 50-50.1-2).
90 For local travel where no travel costs are paid to the traveller, staff members do not require a Travel Request. Written approval from their supervisor must however be kept on record. For the purpose of this paragraph, local travel is considered to be within a 60km radius of the duty station, however, this may be adjusted to suit local context.
100 As mentioned in eManual XVII.2.6.Table 1, emergency travel is defined as duty travel to provide direct operational support for Graded Emergencies or unplanned/unforeseen Public Health Events. Emergency travel is not (i) travel to meetings, (ii) travel to HQ, or (iii) travel to regional offices, unless the purpose is to provide surge capacity.
101 Travel Requests for emergency travel must be flagged as Emergency Travel and include the following in the remarks field:
- "EMERGENCY"
- The name of the pre-graded event/situation or officially recognised emergency
- The country of the crisis
- EXAMPLE: EMERGENCY: MERS CoV QATAR
