CPRich

"now it seems more companies are asking their employees to fork over their frequent flyer miles" seems to come up every few years. Is there any empirical data that this is actually happening?

stallion114

If I were head of travel for a large company I would absolutely try to do this. Think of all the money that could be saved on those last minute flights if booked with miles.
Not sure if they can do it without having the passwords/pins to employees accounts.

ddutil

It comes up on FT every few months. I am too lazy to search and post the links, but it is pretty frequent.

jfhscott

I'm too lazy, too.

But the point/counterpoint always seems to be that the flights were employer funded, so the attendant benefits should go to the employer.

And then someone chimes in about travel for public employees, and how a public employee should never make personal use of miles earned on official travel.

But here is the deal:

Most organizations know the administrative cost of monitoring which miles were employer funded, and that they are not sufficient flyertalk fiends to maximize the benefits, leads them to the conclusion that letting the employee "keep" the miles, doing as they please with them, is the best business decision, legailities aside.

Then four months later, some variant on this topic reappears.

Often1

There are a lot of variants, but they rarely work for administrative reasons. The best one I have heard are employers who have offered employees who use miles to fly on company business, a "bonus" of half the typical cost of the airfare. A win for both the employer who saves 50% on the ticket and the employee who converts the miles to cash at a decent rate.

Bigger problem will be tougher corporate discounts which give the employer a larger discount in return for no miles. That, of course, hurts because it means that employees lose the ancilary benefits of elite status.

MR_MAMA

My Company looks at is a benefit for being away from home 3 wks a month. I consider it as part of my salary package. I miss so many events at home with family and friends that if they took this away from me, I would get another job that requires no travel, no nights away from home, no getting up at 3am to catch a flight, no getting home at midnight due to mechanical delay, no sleeping in a strange hotel in a strange country each night.

They would need to pay me twice the amount they do now if they took this away from me. Thank God they realize this.

fragment54

There would be a huge recoil by those who are required to travel a lot for their jobs. Especially under the "corporate contract for cheap rates w/o miles" idea. If you couldn't even get the benefit of elite miles, no one would want to travel.

roknroll

Seeing how this forum is filled with thousands and thousands of people who travel heavily with large corporations... is there anyone actually here that has their employers force them to use their miles for business travel?

I am pretty surprised that no one has chimed in from personal experience, which leads me to believe this is a non-issue.

johndoe123

Occasionally gets brought up, rarely gets implemented, and even more rarely lasts.

Typical are the small firms with the occasional large corporate offender.

For the most part, it's a non-issue though.

A search in the archives will tell you wonders.

Often1

The government angle was the rule until approx. 2003, when it changed to allow employees to keep and use the miles earned on official travel. As with most businesses, govt. agencies found that it cost a lot more to administer than it saved taxpayers and that the employee goodwill was significant. In the end, if you can provide an employee benefit that doesn't cost you anything, why not?

GSA authorizes government agencies and some have implemented a bonus system whereby an employee who uses FF to pay for travel for which the government would have had to pay, gets a spot bonus equal to 50% of the government fare for the trip. That saves the taxpayer 50% and the employee sees money too.

As an employer, you can spend just so much time and effort turning the screws on your employees before you lose focus on the profit motive behind the business.

When you do petty things to employees, you find that even in the worst economies, the top ones can always find a new job and you are then stuck with the duds whom you wish would have left. And, when you do need to hire, the top tier people won't come to a company which is known for pettiness.

LongviewTX

Being honest to yourself, how many last minute flight will you be able to book with miles? Especially considering that with business travel you have much less flexibility than with personal travel and you cannot just book any flight within 2 business days? An you will probably piss your employees off if you force them to fly with a connection when there is a non-stop flight just so that you can use miles instead of money.

Just as a simple exercise I looked at Continental/United award availability from IAH (my preferred major airport) to NYC (thinking that it should be a popular business destination). No non-stops on 09/1 and 09/2. Connecting flight either arrive in time not suitable for business travelers (past 10pm) or have ridiculous connection times (how about 23 minutes?) or take 7+ hours from take off to landing or combine several of these inconveniences. Conclusion? If I were a business owner this is a clear no go. And we're talking about one of the most well served routes in the country.

I personally cannot see how a proposition to take away frequent flier miles from employees could be anything rather than a "lose-lose"

Often1

+1 - It only works when you have low-level employees who ride a specified circuit and you can book them months out and don't particularly care about routing or their travel time. It certainly doesn't work for people whose time is money, have high-end walk-up (or close to) travel and who bring value to the company.

The only employees who don't likely care are those at the top end: 1) highly-compensated so award travel not necessary; 2) paid F so UG not necessary; 3) fly conveinece not loyalty so status not necessary.

bpo26c

I work for a very large CPG company and they have always kept miles/hotel points to redeem for future employee travel. The policy has changed recently and we were allowed to keep whatever points that were in our accounts. I ended up with about 300k in miles/hotel points .. I can not even guess how many that I lost for redemptions or that were expired

bpo26c

I will also add that it seems that most companies are using common sense approach with travel due to economy and technology. A lot can be accomplished by using technology now available (Live Meetings).

kebosabi

Of course, there's no guarantee that airlines would revise their frequent flyer database to allow corporations to earn their miles rather than their individual employees.

If enough companies start pressuring airlines, they might consider it as corporations are the biggest spenders in air travel these days.

In all, it could just be a simple software upgrade that says:

First/Last Name:
Flying on behalf of: [Corporate name]
credit miles to [Corporation's own FF#]

Places like BestBuy, Staples, and OfficeDepot have started offering business solutions to reward companies with points and discounts, I don't see why not airlines can't jump in on the same bandwagon.