Originally Posted by
GUWonder
Getting into travel while in college -- including with hotel rooms booked under the name of the college student -- and then going on into employer-covered travel as a 20-25 year-old has indeed been quite typical in the US. At many a place, it's not been unusual for people to recruit 20-25 year olds to help take up a bunch of the grunt travel stuff. And given how few complains we would come across about hotel stays for people that age but how many we would hear about for car rentals, it's been pretty clear to me that most hotels in the US don't generally give a problem to 20-25 year olds with a bank card in their name with enough available funds on it for the stay + incidental charges.
That was definitely our company: the younger people were sent on travel assignments all the time because (1) they were usually perfectly fine with it and (2) the older people usually didn't want that lifestyle anymore.
Only thing that required using the company card and official company contracts was rental cars. When I was 21 I could only rent from Hertz and National because those were our two contracts. No big deal since they were everywhere. Our Hertz contract allowed for leisure rentals anywhere in the world, but the National one did not. For hotels, we had a corp code that worked well with Marriott, but we were allowed to book AAA or other rates if they were advantageous.