Originally Posted by
RichMSN
My aggravation with the system, sometimes, is that adding a connection and 5 hours to a trip was considered preferable to spending an extra $100 to $200. On those occasions, I walked into my manager's office and laid it all out and told him what they could do with their stupid travel policies and he would make the problem disappear.
A policy like this that requires using the "cheapest" flight should really order the flights so that if a flight takes longer than the shortest reasonable flight, the hourly rate of the employee is added to the ticket cost for the purpose of ordering the flights by cost. Perhaps also additional penalties for risky connections (e.g. ORD).
For example, suppose these two flights were available:
Flight 1: non-stop 10 hours, $500
Flight 2: one stop 12 hours, $400, but employee's rate is $100/hour, so it is counted as $600 when finding the "cheapest" flight.
Employee would still have the option of taking flight 2 (since it would cost less than flight 1 in actual ticket money), but would not be required to choose it over flight 1 (recognizing that the extra 2 hours is valuable).