Defense Travel System

The Defense Travel System (DTS) is the Department of Defense's enterprise application for booking, authorizing, and reimbursing official temporary-duty (TDY) travel under the Joint Travel Regulations (JTR). DoD travelers use it to build travel authorizations, book commercial reservations, route documents for approval, and file vouchers for reimbursement, with split disbursement between the traveler's bank account and the Government Travel Charge Card (GTCC) vendor. Access requires DoD Common Access Card (CAC) authentication — it is not a public tool despite how it may appear in some listings.

What it is

DTS is an end-to-end travel management system built around two core documents: an authorization, which captures a traveler's planned TDY (destinations, estimated costs, reservations) and routes for approval before travel; and a voucher, which claims actual expenses and earned allowances after travel, pre-populated from the approved authorization. Within DTS, travelers can search airline, hotel, and rental car reservations, check per diem rates, and prepare their own or, with delegated permission, another traveler's documents.

Who operates it

The Defense Travel Management Office (DTMO) holds functional oversight of DTS — travel policy, program management, and customer support — and sits within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, receiving administrative oversight from the Defense Human Resources Activity (DHRA). Technical, acquisition, and operations-and-maintenance oversight of the DTS application runs through DHRA's PMO-DTS.

Access

DTS requires a DoD CAC and a DoD PKI certificate (loaded via a CAC reader and client software such as ActivClient) to log in; sessions time out after periods of inactivity for security. Most first-time DTS users self-register at login (the system creates a personal profile that a Defense Travel Administrator then reviews and accepts); a DTA can also create a profile directly. The application itself is reached through DTMO-published entry points (currently documented at travel.dod.mil's Defense Travel System program page) rather than a single fixed public URL — the legacy defensetravel.osd.mil landing path still resolves but sits behind the same CAC-gated login. The directory's stored access value of "public" does not reflect this and should be corrected.

How logisticians use it

DTS is a personal official-travel tool rather than a materiel-logistics system: logisticians and every other DoD traveler use it to create their own TDY authorizations, book official travel, and file vouchers, and supervisors/approvers use it to route and approve subordinates' travel documents.

Related systems

DTS operates under the Joint Travel Regulations (JTR) and interacts with the Government Travel Charge Card (GTCC) program and GSA travel programs such as per-diem rate lookups; DTMO also oversees the MyTravel booking tool.