Originally Posted by
cbn42
Following that logic, if the hotel is good enough for you to stay at, their food should be good enough for you to eat. I don't think it's proper to have a higher standard for food than for accommodation.
I think it's often a case of someone having a similar standard for "decent" accommodation and food.
There are plenty of hotels where the accommodation is good to great but the free breakfast borders on inedible even if you're not at all picky. Mid-range American chain hotels are, IMO, the worst offenders. I've stayed at plenty of perfectly good Holiday Inn Express, Hampton, Country Inn, etc. properties where the rooms were nice, clean, and in good repair, but they served crumbly powdered eggs, sketchy long shelf life gas station pastries, stale Wonder bread and a brown liquid claiming to be coffee. That said, I've also stayed at properties in the same chain where breakfast was great.
...but I was on per diem anyway, so no one but me cares that I immediately went to the nearest coffee shop
Originally Posted by
cbn42
But personally, I tend to not trust those who demand to be trusted and object to scrutiny of their actions. If your expenses are appropriate, you should have no problem justifying them when requested. If this bothers you, I would not trust you to make decisions on someone else's behalf. Ultimately, people who get defensive and indignant when questioned are often the ones who are more likely to be hiding something.
When requested, sure, either as part of an auditing process or when the expenses look out of the ordinary. But when an employer automatically assumes that an employee who doesn't have a receipt for a $3 coffee is trying to pull one over on the company and refuses to pay for it, it's not at all unreasonable for even the most honest employee to feel unnecessarily micromanaged. (This is a real example from a company I briefly worked for ~5 years ago)
Originally Posted by
Kevin AA
The original complaint was that an employee traveling on business should be able to expense a breakfast of their own choosing instead of the complimentary hotel breakfast. If they're paid per diem, the complaint woudn't exist because anything you spend above the per diem is out of your own pocket.
This actually still comes up in a per diem context. If I stay at a hotel that's within the allowable rate that includes free breakfast, do I have to knock that off my per diem? Uncle Sam's answer is no, as long as the breakfast is actually free (i.e. the rate always includes breakfast). Believe it or not, the interpretation of "included" has even been dragged through the Civilian Board of Claims Appeals a couple times.