Originally Posted by
czarina
I am a public servant who travels on official business. When the government sends you on a trip, that is part of your job. You are told where you need to be, how to get there, and what time to be there. This employee probably did not have the option to change her flight, seat, etc. During official travel, you are not allowed to relinquish your seat in most cases, and this was not one of them.
As a fellow public servant, I'm going to have to disagree with you on this point. We have always been given significant leeway in our travel plans - as long as any requested changes to the "official" schedule do not increase the cost to the government and/or are paid for by the traveler him/herself (and, obviously, as long as they don't interfere with the timing of official business - i.e. you can't miss your conference to get a VDB on the way there), the federal government couldn't care less. I'm not going to go any further on this topic (i.e. revealing what branch of the government I'm in, etc) because that would start to get personally identifiable, and perhaps it's different for your branch and/or department, but it has always been my experience as a public servant that I can request changes to the official travel schedule as long as they don't interfere with gov't business or increase the cost to the gov't.