Originally Posted by
BiggAW
To top it off, you can only expense 250 miles in your own car, longer and they force you to get a rental.
At $0.53/mile (or whatever it is lately), it's almost certainly much cheaper to get a rental for distances that far.
For long drives for us (e.g. LA to SF) if you want to drive yourself, ours will reimburse up to the cost of flying you (including things like the parking etc), which ends up IME being reasonable.
The per diem is the one intelligent thing that they do, as we end up pocketing more money, and it saves some paperwork doing expense reporting, which sounds like a total nightmare to do receipt by receipt.
We do per diem, too, which works out well for me because part of my travel expenses are the petsitters, which I probably couldn't get reimbursed on receipts, but since the per diems are reasonably generous I don't end up taking a loss.