Originally Posted by
littlefish
This is a useful illustration. Seems to me there was an opportunity here to negotiate but the candidate rather found a way to check a particularly large minus box.
It would be quite normal to raise the point in bold and to discuss what the employer saw as "possible" and "occasional"; both of which typically are appealing to me as long as I know where and, given that answer, how the travel arrangements would work. Tokyo and New York would be different for flight options but also I'd been super keen on hotel policies; Melbourne, Dubai or Jo'burg would lead to a slightly different line of enquiry by me.
Keenness to lead / support on different clients, savvy enough to build in veto or push-back when the opportunity moved on to 10 trips a year to tiring and more risky locations … never mind Y or J.
I don’t see how there is really an opportunity to negotiate travel policy with an employer. The policy is there, as a policy it might allow exceptions to the ‘general rule’ in various circumstances, but wouldn't it be odd for a company to agree something completely outside of that as part of an employment contract?
Even at director level it would seem cumbersome to have individually negotiated policies - say the COO had negotiated something but the CFO hadn’t, do they fly in different cabins when travelling together? Better to have a tiered policy, it seems to me.
For consultants there’s more room to negotiate your own thing but for employees I’m not so sure. Would be interested to hear from those who have done it. (Never been an issue for me as I don’t generally travel for work.)