Originally Posted by
mvoight
I feel your pain. This is why I have not been able to fly with my wife on her work trips. She's had to fly Untied.. I still went, since I can work from anywhere with high speed internet access.... but I "had" to fly AA and suffer through the upgrades and Priority AAcess. She doesn't fly enough for UA status, and is about to lose AA PLT status earned on a cheap lat Oct-early Nov 07 trip to DUB.
Of course, as a taxpayer, if it saves money, then it is probably a good thing.
Now, if we could just use some common sense in future bailouts. It seems that politicians will add on unrelated extras to any legistlation.
I'm all for saving taxpayer money, after all, I am one myself.
Having worked as a conference planner for a couple of years I can assure that on any given day it has nothing to do with saving money. I had hotels offering substantial discounts over the "approved" hotel. The cheaper hotels had better facilities, nicer rooms, etc. BUT, they didn't want to jump through the paperwork jungle necessary to get the contract. The waiver authority required so much paperwork to justify the cheaper hotel it wasn't worth pursuing. (Only so many hours in a day) End result was the Government Travel program cost us an extra couple of hundred thousand dollars a year.