General
What is Helix?
Helix is an AI-powered corporate travel management platform. Employees book flights and hotels by chatting in natural language with an AI assistant; Helix searches partner inventory, applies the company's travel policy, ranks the best options, handles approvals where required, and tracks spend across the organisation. It's built for companies that want to control travel costs without forcing their team to learn legacy booking tools.
Who is Helix for?
Helix is designed for SMBs and mid-market companies (10–1,000 employees) that spend anywhere from £50k to £5M per year on business travel. Typical buyers are travel managers, finance leaders, operations teams, HR, and executive assistants.
What can I book through Helix?
Today: flights from major airlines and a global hotel inventory. Rail and ground transport are on the roadmap.
How long does setup take?
Most companies are live within a day. An admin verifies the company domain, invites the team, picks a policy template (or builds a custom one), and travellers can start booking immediately.
How can I try Helix?
Visit demo.heyhelix.ai — no registration required. You can explore the assistant, run searches, and see dynamic pricing and policy enforcement in action straight away. Do my employees need training?
No. Travellers book by chatting with the assistant in plain language (“Book me a flight to NYC next Tuesday, returning Friday”). The assistant handles search, comparison, policy checks, and booking. There are no forms to learn.
What does it cost?
Helix uses graduated annual seat pricing: Tier 1 covers your first 100 travellers, with lower per-seat rates for travellers 101–1,000 and 1,001+. Policy, approvals, expenses, analytics, audit and support are all included in the seat price. See pricing and ROI for the full table and calculator. Which suppliers does Helix book through?
Flights, hotels, and event tickets and activities are booked through live supplier integrations. Rail and ground transport are on the roadmap.
Can Helix see or share our travel data?
Your data is used to run your travel programme, not shared or sold. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. See our Privacy Policy for the details. For travellers
How do I book a trip?
Open Helix, tell the assistant where and when you want to travel, and it will search flights and hotels, rank the best options for you, and walk you through selecting and confirming the booking. You can refine by airline, time of day, baggage, hotel star rating, neighbourhood, and more — just by asking.
Why am I seeing certain options ranked higher?
Helix re-orders results based on your company's travel policy. In-policy options (preferred airlines, in-budget hotels, the right cabin class for the trip length) get boosted to the top. You'll always see why a recommendation was made, and you can override the ranking if you want to compare alternatives.
What happens if my booking is over budget?
Depending on your company's policy settings, one of five things will happen:- Default — the in-policy option is pre-selected, but you can override it
- Rank — out-of-policy options drop down the list but remain bookable
- Warn — you'll see a warning and may need to provide a justification
- Require approval — your booking is held until a manager or finance approver signs it off
- Hard block — you can't complete the booking and need to choose an in-policy option
You'll always see exactly which rule was triggered and what the budget benchmark was, so there are no surprises.
Why is my budget different from a colleague's?
Helix uses dynamic, market-aware budgets rather than a single fixed cap. The cheapest reasonable flight for London→New York on a Tuesday is genuinely different from London→Manchester on a Friday — and a hotel cap that's generous in regional Spain is restrictive in central Paris. Your budget reflects real prices on the route and dates you're actually travelling, not a one-size-fits-all number set months ago.
What does "frozen budget" mean?
Once you start a booking, Helix locks the budget benchmark for that trip. If hotel or flight prices shift while you're choosing, the cap won't move underneath you mid-booking. The frozen benchmark is recorded against the trip so approvers see exactly what you saw.
Can I add receipts and out-of-pocket expenses to a trip?
Yes. Snap a photo of any receipt — taxi, meal, parking, supplies — and Helix's AI extracts the merchant, amount, currency, category, and date automatically. Receipts can be linked to a trip and either marked for reimbursement or as non-reimbursable. Categories include Airfare, Lodging, Taxi & Rideshare, Transit & Parking, Vehicle Expenses, Meals, Client Entertainment, Office Supplies & Hardware, Software & Subscriptions, Communication, Education & Training, and Miscellaneous.
How do approvals work for me as a traveller?
If your booking needs approval, Helix puts it on hold and notifies your approver immediately. They see the booking details, the policy rule that was triggered, the price vs. the benchmark, and your justification (if you provided one). Most approvals happen within minutes via email or mobile. You'll be notified as soon as the decision is made.
Can employees use Helix for personal travel?
Yes, where the organisation enables it. Helix detects whether a booking is being made in a personal or business context and applies the right policy and pricing automatically. Personal bookings don't go through corporate approvals — and the privacy boundary applies: your employer can never see your personal activity.
Is my data private?
Your company sees the business trips it is paying for. It cannot see anything personal you do with Helix — that boundary is built into the system, not a setting someone can switch off. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
What happens if an airline changes our flight?
Helix handles airline-initiated changes for you: it picks up the schedule change, updates the itinerary, and re-evaluates your company's policy on the changed booking so nothing quietly drifts out of policy.
For admins & finance
What is Lowest Logical Fare (LLF)?
LLF is the cheapest reasonable fare on a specific route and date — not the cheapest fare full-stop. Helix analyses all flights for the route, filters out unreasonable options (extreme layovers, multi-stop itineraries when a direct exists, inconvenient overnight connections), and identifies the true lowest sensible fare.
You then set policy as a percentage above LLF rather than a fixed number. For example: "allow up to 30% over LLF". Example: if LLF for London→New York on 15 January is £450, the cap for that booking is £585. If LLF on a different date is £700, the cap moves with it.
Why this matters: fixed caps go stale fast. £500 might be generous in low season and impossible at peak. LLF gives travellers a fair, market-grounded budget without anyone having to update spreadsheets.
How do dynamic hotel rate caps work?
Helix computes the median market rate (MMR) for hotels matching the trip — same destination, same dates, comparable star rating. The median is used as the benchmark, and your policy sets an allowed percentage over it (e.g., "20% over median 3-star rate").
Example: if median 3-star hotels in Paris on those nights cost €180, the policy cap is €216/night. The same policy in regional France might produce a €120 cap automatically. You don't have to set per-city budgets — the market does it for you.
If a filtered sample (e.g., only 4-star) is too small to be statistically meaningful, Helix falls back to a wider sample so the benchmark is always robust.
Can travellers game the benchmark by searching narrow time windows?
No. Helix runs benchmark queries with expanded windows (e.g., ±3 hours for flights, wider radius for hotels) regardless of the traveller's exact search. The benchmark reflects the real market, not whatever cherry-picked subset a traveller might query. This is standardised so the same trip always produces the same cap.
What's the difference between dynamic and fixed budget caps?
| Fixed cap | Dynamic cap |
|---|
| How it's set | Manually, e.g. "£200/night" | Computed from market data per booking |
| Adapts to destination | No | Yes |
| Adapts to travel dates | No | Yes |
| Maintenance | High (needs review) | Zero |
| Fair to travellers | Sometimes | Always grounded in real prices |
You can use either or both in Helix — fixed caps are still useful for absolute ceilings (e.g., "no single booking over £5,000 ever"), while dynamic caps handle the day-to-day.
How does the Helix policy engine work?
The policy engine evaluates every booking against your active rules and produces a result that includes: defaults to apply (pre-selected filters), ranking signals (to reorder results), violations triggered, and any approval requirements. There are 11 rule types and 5 enforcement modes.
Rule types:- Flights — cabin class by flight duration, preferred airlines, blocked airlines, max stops, dynamic LLF cap, sustainability (CO₂)
- Hotels — budget by location, dynamic rate cap, minimum star rating
- General — advance booking requirement, destination blacklist, max trip cost
Enforcement modes:- Default — the in-policy choice is pre-selected; traveller can override
- Rank — in-policy options are boosted in result ordering
- Warn — booking is allowed but flagged; justification can be required
- Require approval — booking is held until an approver signs off
- Hard block — booking cannot be completed at all
You can mix modes per rule — e.g., warn at 10% over LLF, require approval at 20% over, hard block at 50% over.
Can different teams have different policies?
Yes. Create user groups (Executives, Sales, Engineering, Contractors) and assign different policy sets, approval chains, and budget thresholds to each. Approver routing follows the manager hierarchy you configure, and group-level default approvers handle the fallback case.
How do approvals work?
When a booking triggers a "require approval" rule, the pending booking is held and routed to the appropriate approver. The approver sees:- The traveller's justification (if any)
- The booking details and total price
- The exact policy rule that was triggered
- The benchmark data the cap was computed from (LLF / median rate)
- Sustainability data, if tracked
- A one-click approve or reject
Approvals happen via email, mobile, or the web app. Once approved, the booking proceeds to completion. If rejected, the traveller can search again. Low-risk bookings can be auto-approved or self-approved based on your configuration.
How do expenses work for finance teams?
Expenses captured by travellers (uploaded receipts, parsed by AI) are matched to trips and become visible in the finance dashboard. Each expense has merchant, amount, currency, category, date, reimbursable flag, and the linked trip. You can:- Filter by category, cost code, traveller, date range
- Approve or reject for reimbursement
- Export to CSV for your accounting system
- Track per-trip totals against trip budgets
How does Helix handle different currencies?
Travellers see prices in your organisation's preferred currency throughout the booking flow, with live exchange rates applied automatically. The rate used is recorded against each booking for clean reconciliation.
What roles can I assign to users?
| Role | Can do |
|---|
| Owner | Everything — billing, settings, policies, users |
| Travel admin | Manage policies, approvals, view all trips |
| Finance admin | Cost codes, exports, reporting |
| Approver | Approve/reject assigned trips |
| Traveller | Book trips, view own bookings, submit expenses |
Can I assign cost codes to bookings?
Yes. Define your cost code structure (e.g., ENG-001, MKT-002), map them to GL codes and cost centres, and require or optionally collect them at booking time. Cost codes flow through to reports and exports for clean reconciliation with your accounting system.
What does the audit trail capture?
Every action — booking created, policy evaluated, approval requested, approval decision, expense uploaded, expense approved — is logged with a timestamp and the user who performed it. Policy evaluations record which rules matched, what the benchmark was, and what the outcome was. Audit logs are exportable for finance and duty-of-care reviews.
Does Helix integrate with SSO?
Yes — enterprise plans support SSO/SAML. All plans use Supabase Auth (built on AWS) with magic-link sign-in, role-based access control, and email domain verification on signup so only authorised employees can join your organisation.
