My company has a pretty clear policy on all of these issues. We are not allowed to volunteer for bumps - but I don't know how they would know. We also keep all of our miles and other perks. We are not allowed to get miles if there is a cost - for example, I believe National car rental charges taxes for the miles they give, so we cannot earn miles from National, but rental credits are OK. We have our own travel agency that is strict on the pricing policy - if there is a >$100 savings on a cheaper fare (even with a connection) leaving/arriving within so many hours of request, we are supposed to take it. If we say no, it gets sent for approval (not sure who's approval) before they will book it. They do this to me every time I travel to one of our plants, since Delta tends to be about $150-200 cheaper than the direct flight on NW. The policy makers did not realize that adding 4+ hours of travel time to my itinerary, losing productive daytime hours, etc. is worth more than the savings. Since I am a contractor and paid by the hour, any savings would be wasted since I would definatly bill those hours. I understand there were problems in the past with people booking expensive fares for miles, etc. - but they are making the travel agent enforce a policy that should be handled at the local department level where the budgets are maintained. Fine if they want to report me for taking the expensive fare and let my boss handle it if I am abusing things, but don't hold up my reservation for four days waiting for the approval, just to have the fare increase in that time.

I had a situation a couple weeks ago where I was at another location with a 5 pm departure. I realized I had no meetings scheduled that afternoon, most of the people I would need to work with were tied up, etc. so I called to change the flight to a noon departure that would get me home 3.5 hours earlier. Since it was a B fare (NW) there was no change fee. There was an extra fee of about $5 since I was routing through MEM instead of direct. I called NW direct to make the change and put the cost on my own credit card and am not going to expense it. I don't know if the travel agent could see this if they looked, but I know my boss would have no problem with it.