Jeez, all of sudden I have an extra appreciation of being a "blue collar" worker. It was quite a change from my "white collar" days. Nowdays, if it has anything to do with work, I get paid, hour by hour.

On top of that, my FF program is 100% my business. It is explicitly understood to be, at least in part, compensation for having to travel. Sounds like I should be grateful (which I am.)

BTW, if you want to see a great way to quit your job, go see American Beauty. A superb movie, and has some great scenes involving a change of career.

Regards,

Ken Hamer

At my firm, they arrange it so we get to keep all the points, miles, you name it. There is a company credit card, but you can use your own also (necessity for hotel points, and also good since it's a miles card in itself...) Almost makes up for being expected to eat on $25 a day no matter where you are...

While my company is very liberal in travel policies (we keep miles, we can expense up to $150 for club membership per year, flights over 7 hours are in business class, etc), what I hate is our agent's desire to put everything on their selected airline. That's really a pain in the butt.

I think you'll all get a rise out of this. Since Dorian lists that all the points are on Air Canada, I will assume that a Canadian residency is in play here. I was involved in a very minor case several years ago in Canada that might offer you some insight on who owns the miles, provided you've got the grit to run with this. A company decided to take the employees miles, similar to what is stated here. One employee refused to go along with this and was subsequently fired. He then brought legal action against the company and eventuially won a very nice financial settlement. The ruling of the judge (which means there is a legal presedent in this area) is that the "ownership" of the miles was an implied part of the employees 'condition of employment' when he started and it doesn't need to be documented. The change in ownership of the miles was an illegal "change of condition" with the employees work and thus the judge ruled in favor of the employee. The key factor here, is that the action by the company was directed to miles being a part of the travel policy. There was a way for the company to win this, but they erred in their strategy. I'd rather not put what the error was since this thread was started with the idea of employee rights. So Dorian, if you'd like to scare the $#@%$^& out of your company, I can give you a legal opinion on who owns your miles.......

Now we are getting somewhere!!!!!!

Dorian

Matt Wald, When I was a consultant, the answer was definitely YES, and I was expected to bill the client for it (assuming it was a time & expenses contract, as opposed to fixed fee). Granted, I usually worked on the plane (planning for the meeting, or getting started on the ubiquitous follow-up), which made me even more feel it was reasonable to count (and bill) the travel time.

can i bump this thread?

I think you just did.

Wow, BOS-NWA, this must be some kind of a record for a bump--5+ years between posts.

As a consultant, I've been told that my client will not pay me for hours spent flying, unless I am also doing work. I save up presentations, white papers, etc. to read on the plane , but I still travel nights and weekends most of the time. Meanwhile, the client's employees pretty much always travel during business hours, to the point where it can be difficult to schedule around them. ("Sorry, I'm traveling all day Friday. Did I forget to update my Outlook?")

It depends on the deal you manage to negotiate with the client. I've seen both situations (client pays for travel time; client doesn't pay for travel time) and something in between (client pays 50% of normal rate for travel, or pays for travel time up to a certain cap per trip). Generally, I try to work on the flight anyway; so it does not make a big difference in billable time.