bisonrav

If policy is that "ALL employees up to and including the CEO are required to travel in economy class for flights of a duration of less than 7 hours", which ours is, it's not always about the money, it can be about perception, external and internal. Op Ups are sufficiently rare so as not to be a practical problem. On the other hand, if you're systematically upgrading yourself then there's a higher likelihood of being caught out.

On that basis, a gate upgrade is pretty much outside the control of the employee (though there are plenty who would refuse it if they had an exit row in ET), but a self upgrade isn't. Yes, it's dumb, yes this should be a personal choice, but that's how corporate life works sometimes.

On the rebate thing, this fascinates me, because the corporate travel centres are measured (as far as I have been able to tell) on magnitude of savings via reference to a nominal ticket cost, including rebate, and on the overall savings % against nominal. So as the magnitude savings are roughly proportionate to spend, it's in their interest to increase overall travel spend as long as it's pushed through official booking channels. They may also have thresholds to reach to qualify for discount levels, which is why bypassing the TA is verboten.

Meanwhile the poor sods in the downstream business units are measured on total overhead costs of travel - I calculated last year that I was paying 25% over the odds for my economy bookings if made by the TA (including fee), this scales up to serious money in the context of the overall SH budget for the BU. So it's a really dumb policy in the abstract, but on the other hand my BU has always been very proactive about following policy and keeping costs down (Saturday night stays incentivised for example, WTP is the top class ever allowed), where some peer BUs in the organisation are fairly slapdash about authorisation, and book fully flex Y even when it doesn't really make sense, So overall the corporate travel policy probably has reduced costs.