I'd be curious what the actual consolidator fares are. Sometimes the further discounts on low fare buckets are quite small (2% - 5%). If that's the case, perhaps you could somehow pay the difference out of pocket.

...also fly in coach, unless they're very senior, are involved in a prestige overseas campus, or fall into a number of other limited exceptions. Indeed, I suspect most academic administrators rarely travel out of the country, unless they're recruiting foreign students or donors.

okay, several of you are saying that only reputable employers put people in BE and I'm sorry but sounds like a lot of you are also out of touch with reality. I've worked for 3 major software companies in my life. During the 90s; yes--it was common that any flight over X hours was in BE; but then it shifted to only execs, then finally it shifted to "we dont buy business at all for anyone." I've talked to several people at several different larger companies to find out if this has been a trend and they all seem to have similar policies plus I read about everyone having those same policies on this forum.

I think it's safe to no longer assume that only "reputable" employers put you in BE. With fares for BE ranging between 4-15k; it's just no longer feasible for most companies who are making a profit.

I won't try to represent everyone--I'm a corporate trainer by trade and my company has a small team (13 of us) who do this every week. If we were putting everyone in BE; we'd barely make any return/margin on the classes we teach and our parent company might honestly just do all of our training/certification classes online.

And academics traveling when consulting for private industry....

Yeah sometimes BE doesn't make sense for the company... however the unpublished fares don't seem to make sense to me either. Sounds like if employees are really flying that often/much the company would be better off getting a corporate contract rate/deal directly with DL instead of buying through 3rd party channels. As bennos mentioned, gray market consolidator fare discounts on low fare buckets usually are not a significant discount anyway.

You can also get more MQM's with Amex Delta Reserve card.

Well, in my case it is funding I get from industry partners so it is not tuition, not government grants and not from the university. I bring in the $$ so I should have some say as to how they are spent, and a couple extra thousand of dollars over the lifetime of multi-million dollar contacts is worth it when I have to fly to Mumbai or Rio for 48 hours of meetings...

I have no problem with this in terms of buying BE, but it's not the common model for people working in higher ed and academic research.

Exactly. See George Clooney's job evaporate in *Up In The Air*.

my point is that even at other large corporations; it is no longer "common" that you automatically get a BE seat if a flight is over x hours.

I have no idea what the fare rates are, and I know they use an in house travel agency to arrange all this travel for people.

Alaska has already told me that they give full miles for Delta flights. There really isn't any point in sticking with Delta skymiles program now, I get the benefits through the end of next year, but I'll have Alaska Gold within the first half of the year. all very silly i guess.

thanks for the replies

*Sigh* - yep. Ours used to be anything over 8 hours you could book into Business Class. Waved goodbye to that years ago. Dammit.