Booking and reimbursement of travel (only for reimbursed users)

According to the ESRF travel rules for users, the ESRF books and financially contributes to the most economical ticket available at the time of the request; these are usually 2nd class train tickets and economy-class flight tickets.

Early booking ensures more options and cheaper flights and so, to encourage early booking, the ESRF financial contribution to flight and train tickets is higher for tickets that are booked early by the user.

The flexibility in the ESRF financial contribution for tickets booked more than 21 days in advance of travel, less than 21 days in advance of travel and less than 14 days in advance of travel are indicated in the table below.

Please note that the "no reimbursement" rule for travel booked less than 14 days before travel will be strictly reinstated starting from 1st February 2024. It had been suspended during the COVID pandemic due to the significant international travel disruptions.

The e-travel application “SAP Concur” must be used for travel arrangement.

Link to the e-travel application “SAP Concur”: the link will be sent to users by email once they are registered on the A Form for an experiment and will also be accessible from the User Portal in the Experiment sessions list in the "further actions" column (plane icon). This icon only appears for reimbursed users.

All reimbursed users are required to submit a travel request in the application as early as possible and no later than 14 days before arriving at the ESRF. Users will therefore be are aware of the level of reimbursement from the ESRF before making their trip.

During the preparation of their travel request, reimbursed users are requested to book their pre-paid air/train tickets directly via SAP Concur. This booking populates the travel request header automatically, and users are then asked to complete their travel expenses estimation with any other type of travel expense.

The ESRF highly recommends that users download the SAP Concur mobile application on their smartphone (accessible either from the App Store or Google Play) in order to facilitate their reimbursement claim procedure. This way, the traveling user will be able to take photos of his/her travel receipts (via this application) during their trip and get them certified automatically. Once certified by the application, the paper travel tickets are no longer required for their reimbursement by the ESRF.

Finally, SAP Concur enables the creation of the reimbursement claim from the approved request with automatically pre-filled expenses. The user will then be asked to upload the certified expense receipts and submit their claim electronically.

For users who don’t wish to use the SAP Concur mobile application, it is still possible to submit their reimbursement claim electronically via a computer. However, as the receipts won’t be certified by the application the user will have to scan each receipt individually and attach them to the corresponding expense in the SAP Concur application in order to submit the reimbursement claim, and send the original paper travel expenses receipts via mail together with a paper version of the reimbursement claim from the SAP concur interface as they used to do in the past.

Several video tutorials and training documents have been created to guide you through these new procedures - we recommend that you watch them carefully before creating your first travel request (and reimbursement claim), to become familiar with the software.

If you need further help, please contact:

SAP Concur User Service Desk
For technical difficulties with the application.
24/24, 7/7 - +33 (0)8.05.54.10.61 (France) ; +44 (0)2037.936933 (outside of France)
ESRF Travel Office or ESRF User Office
For assistance with your travel booking or reimbursement claim submission.
Monday to Friday - from 8.00 to 12.00 and 13.00 to 17.00 - +33 (0)4.76.88.24.17