Originally Posted by
invisible
At my wife's company (small wholly owned subsidiary of very large multi-national company) there is a policy - any fare (booked thru corporate travel portal provided by AMEX) which is more than $100 of the cheapest available - even for international flight - requires approval.
This obviously generates quite weird results. An example - a round trip from Singapore to US: cheapest flights are on Air China/China Eastern and other Chinese carriers in US $780-$900 range with two connections inside China and 12-14h between connections with total travel time of 38h and more.
Well, if one selects one connection, then there are better options available, but the most logical ones are outside the policy.
Does your company has similar flight booking policy and how do you overcome this?
Originally Posted by
jrl767
usually there's a block on the online travel request form where you can enter your rationale for not accepting the lowest fare; the travel request goes into the system normally, and if the approving supervisor/manager doesn't have an issue with your rationale they just approve and send on ... if anyone rejects the request, the system should automatically send it back to you; alternatively, that individual may call or email you directly to discuss before rejecting or approving
a succinct statement ("lowest cost route was 2 connections and 38 hours vs 1 connection and 26 hours") should generally be sufficient
My old company (consulting firm) had this type of policy and
jrl767's response is basically how it was managed.
From time to time I would violate the cheapest airfare policy, would enter in the reason, and never once had it flagged for further evaluation (probably since expenses were being paid by clients).
Most of the time it was when I was traveling weekly to CMH from DCA/IAD and there was a DCA - CMH RT direct on US (then part of *A so okay for me since I was heavy on UA) and it was always $100+ more than DCA - ORD - CMH RT but still within reason for the project expense budget.