CO is NOT encouraging unethical behavior, they are simply encouraging bying higher fares. In some cases buying a high fare ticket makes sense if you know your going to be making lots of changes - or any changes. I've often had tickets where the differences was less than $100 between a fully changeable and an fee-changeable. In those cases it makes sense for the employees to purchase the higher fare since in the long run they are saving money.

Lastly, back to being a consultant and billing clients - if you spend an extra 45 mins in the airport checkin line, then another 25 extra mins in the security line - and do this both on the outbound and the return, then you just cost your client over two hours of billed time. Now, if you have status and can reduce those numbers from 45 mins to 2 mins in line and from 25 mins to 5 mins in line you just saved your client money.

My point is either side of this agruement can be argued forever - however it all comes down to that in most cases it makes sense for the employee to make a decision which IN THE LONG RUN saves the company money. If that means buying a slightly higher fare to avoid change fees, or if that means sticking with a certain airline when the cost is less than the allocated time billed, those should be considered.