chrisl137

I was pointing out that while it's not an incentive, doing the RT twice is also nonsensical for many situations - I live and work in LA and often have to go to DC, sometimes working end of one week, beginning of the next, or DC followed by BOS. There's no sense in spending 8 or 9 hours of travel time (air+drive to/from two airports) twice to fly me back to LA for the weekend. If we aren't working through the weekend, my expenses over the weekend are paid by the company anyway. We have a very generous travel policy that generally covers your expenses to be at the remote location one day early and stay one extra day so that people aren't being ground up by the travel.

If it's the SF bay area, that's fine if you want to fly me back and forth every day-- it takes less time for me to get from home to SJC, SFO, or OAK at commute times than it does to get to LAX.

greggarious

The best is when you need to get a separate receipt for your lonely little pint, or else they'll refuse to reimburse the entire meal.

It's not that bad in the US/Canada if you let them know at the start, but if there's a language barrier it can be a pain.

obduro

A minor annoyance, but my company will not allow me to book outside of economy for train travel...even when first class is cheaper (which is often the case as I tend to travel at short notice).

matrixwalker2012

My company is quite reasonable with poeple deviating trips. When it comes to arriving early or leaving late to spend a weekend in our destination city, our travel department generally doesn't care about the cost difference based on the new schedule, as sometimes it can be a couple bucks more and sometimes it's a couple bucks less. However, if it's an obscene amount, then the department VP would hear about it and most of us wouldn't want to face our VP in that situation. In general, when the cost differential for flights is within say $50-$100, the company doesn't really care. Nothing is refunded to the employee for saving the money, which is usually the case, and there are no expectations of the employee paying the small additional charge either.

Now if we decide to fly to another city, then we are expected to cover the cost differential. If the differential is cheaper, then we're just told to have a nice day and enjoy.

My VP is also adamant about no redeyes and no connecting flights, though he won't stop us if we choose to do that.

crabbing

some years back, my company rolled out a new requirement that all travel (planes, cars, hotels) had to be arranged through a new preferred agency. i quickly determined that this agency increased the cost of everything. we tried so dummy bookings, without making any attempt to get a discount, and the agency's costs were always more.

it didn't last long, once we pointed that out.

it was obvious that the agency was charging a fee on top of the actual travel costs, without even trying to get discounts. we long suspected that whoever set up this deal was either related to the owner of the travel agency or getting a share of the take.

emma69

Ok, maybe not zero, but I wouldn't be impressed if I was saving the company $1200 on a flight and they wouldn't cover the $300 hotel room.

Proudelitist

It would save the company 1200 dollars, would you really be prepared to spend that money on principle when you could save it?

chgoeditor

In the US, companies aren't legally required to provide comp time to salaried workers. Some do, some don't.

Galileo787

Our corporate fortune 500 travel department has basically the same policy, can stay the weekend if cost is not more then the actual trip with flight/hotel/rental car or pay the difference. The rates for flights/hotels/rentals is not the actual costs on the itinerary, it's negotiated, rebated incentives on total purchased revenue and no extra charges for cancellation/change of plan fees.

ffsim

Same here in Canada. Good employers, however, typically find some tangible way to remunerate salaried employees who do more than the work they're expected to do. This can be in the form of bonuses, extra days off, etc etc.

cbn42

While we Flyertalkers are usually experts at booking things at the best possible cost, from the company's perspective it may be very rational to not allow deviation from policy. Most employees will not abuse it, but there may be some unscrupulous ones who will extend their trip on the company's dime, and then fudge the numbers to make it look like they saved the company's money. There are plenty of easy ways to do that. Bosses aren't always well versed in the nuances of booking, so from the company's perspective, it may make mroe sense not to allow this than to hire someone (or outsource the task) to evaluate these situations.

Avis may have been giving the company a rebate on amount spent, or a certain number of free rentals or something else of value in return for a certain number of bookings. These details aren't always disclosed to employees.

DeweyCheathem

I worked for a company that was pretty reasonable about stuff like this (It helped that the CFO is a close friend of mine).

A while back, I had a 2 day trade show in Nice, which I combined with customer visits in Grenoble, France and Ivrea, Italy for a product I was introducing. With all of the travel, this was about 5 and a half days of actual work trip. Coach airfare, if I didn't stay over a Saturday night, would have been about $3000. If I stayed over one or two Saturdays, I knocked the airfare down to around $1200. I basically arranged with the CFO that if he covered the hotels, car rental and dining for the extra 3 days/nights, which I told him would come to an additional $600-750, I would save him at least $1000 overall on the travel expenses. He, being a smart CFO, and knowing that I had legitimate business in those locations, agreed it was a no-brainer. I ended up spending 3 days wine tasting in Piemonte in Italy and the Rhone Valley in France on the company's dime. And also got the necessary business accomplished. The CFO also got a nice bottle of Estate bottled Cannubi Barolo out of the deal.

bhomburg

One of the dumbest things an employer of mine has done travel-expense-wise was to craft a preferred-vendor agreement with Avis that had a 300km-a-day mileage allowance instead of unlimited mileage, with excess mileage charges starting at 30 cents/km.
The trip I needed a car for (visiting another office in another country) typically was 240 kms one way, so the company got hit with high overage charges every time. It would have been considerably cheaper to rent the vehicle for two days even if I needed it only for one day. This wasn't allowed, though - I could not expense a two-day rental for a one-day trip. This went on for years.

zanderblue

You need to be careful when comparing charged prices for travel expenses versus actual cost to company.
Most or if not all big multinationals have contract agreements with providers that trigger significant rebates after preset spend limits are hit.
So although it appears flight costs more than freely available on internet or direct from airline, after rebate is applied the actual cost is a lot less.

VivoPerLei

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