That, or the policymakers at said company are just exercising the knee-jerk instinct to choose the smallest, cheapest, and most basic option possible in order to save pennies now, without really looking beyond the tip of their nose.

Similar in some ways to how my parents go looking for a TV and grab the $200 Wally World Special, complain about the picture, and then have something fuzz out on it in about a year. At which point they go back and buy the now $250 Wally World Special. Rinse, repeat. Meanwhile I spent $3k for an HD flatscreen in 2002 that I'm still enjoying daily and have no reason to replace. Plus, it meant I had an HD flatscreen in 2002.

And of course, there is a wide range in between and even beyond those two ends of the spectrum.

Or it wants to save money. For my part, the more people who can't justify J fares the better. At least up and until airlines start reducing the size of J cabins.

The 2012 Fiesta and the 2012 Jetta sedan have identical IIHS and NHTSA crash test ratings.

Now, if they give you an Aveo, that might be greater cause for concern if you expect to get into a crash.

Requiring employees to fly on Delta or United. Any other airline requires filling out a form, detailing why we can't fly those two airlines, etc.
A few months ago a colleage flew R/T from MIA to LAX via ATL on Delta for about $880. He could have had a non-stop by flying from FLL to LAX on Virgin America for $550.
Go figure.

Have to disagree on this one. Unless MrKendall knows the exact terms of his employer's contract with DL and UA, he can't possibly say that the overall savings aren't justified even if he found one example where the savings look to be greater the other way around. Additionally, unless he has seen the confidential contracts, he won't know whether the DL/UA deals include high-level status and certs (GS + GPU's) for certain people.

And, all his employer is doing is asking that OP justify using the non-prefered carrier which, in the example, he presumably can.

Most companies which do this have moved away from paper forms and to software which simply pops up a fill-in box when a non-prefered carrier, class, route, etc., is used. You type in the reason and you're done. The management then sees exception reports which summarize the reasons people have used.

In fairness, the contracts are generally confidential and the exact terms are not disclosed to employees.

Which in an age of empowerment, transparency and accountability (?), doesn't tend to work well for getting employee buyin.

I, too, want to know how much were paying for flights but it just doesn't work that way. Your company would want cheaper airfares than their competitors to give them a financial edge. This needs to stay confidential so that the competitors don't go to the airlines and demand the same pricing. The airlines need to keep this confidential to prevent everyone from learning where their cut-me-own-throat price level lies or otherwise everyone would demand that pricing.

It also prevents employees from expecting the corporate rate when they are on personal travel - the airline wants holidaymakers paying full whack.

No one on FT likes it, but it serves the people who "matter", I.e, the airline and the companies, pretty well.

This approach is actually standard with corporate procurement for all sorts of things - for example, the purchase of bulk materials (concrete, steel, etc) by construction companies.

The supplier strikes a deal which will give "rebates" dependent on how much business you do with them. $1m in a year, you get 15% back, $2m, you get 20% back, $3m, you get 35% back, etc. It gets assessed at the end of the year and an amount (often quite substantial) of payments made is refunded, or "rebated", in cash (actually often netted off against the subsequent billing). The agreements are of course structured to maximise the amount of business put through to the selected suppliers.

It does mean that the individual, and their department budget, doesn't see the benefit of this, but the corporate overall does. It leads to all sorts of internal frictions as a result, especially as it's often presented as "Procurement has negotiated the right deals, now live with it".

Because of the amounts being returned, it can also lead to a "revenue creep" in quoted airfares where the number of corporate agreements is considerable on a route, as well as some interesting "presentations" of corporate agreements by airlines to the purchasing management of major companies taking place in all sorts of exotic locations. Thus ABC Airlines presenting their 2013 corporate agreement improvements in Barbados or wherever, to the selected few !

Find me an air carrier / hotel chain / car rental chain which does not insist on the confidentiality of the deals which are negotiated. The answer you will find is zero. Even though this is an issue well outside the employer's discretion (I suppose an employer could refuse the discount if it's to be confidential), most sophisticated employees don't necesarily know of or understand every aspect of company operations. They know the parts which affect their job.

It's enough for an employee to know that his company has a negotiated discount with a given air carrier and that he must use the prefered carrier or justify the use of another.

If I was a betting man, I'd bet that your firm actually paid approximately $600-650 for that DL seat. (70-75% of full retail)

Of course, you might ask: why isn't the $550 better? Probably because the DL/UA contracts are negotiated periodically based on volume flown. If a ton of your company's business is being flown on highly-competitive UA and DL routes, the 20-30% savings on every one of those flights makes the occasional flight where you're losing a few bucks (vs. the Virgin flight) still worthwhile.

The volume component is one reason a lot of corporate travel agents encourage you to call them for your personal vacation travel.

My current firm has a similar rule and UA and DL are the two carriers there as well. Fortunately, because UA is huge, I can usually find my way onto a UA or US flight. Getting onto AA would typically require something like MCI-DFW - a short nonstop that would be a half-day of flying if I used UA. But the override process is electronic and not contested if it makes sense.

I beg to differ that it serves the companies well. I observe far too many people ignoring the policy or circumventing it because it is not well understood or is stupid.

If I can see the component buy prices from our suppliers, understand our total costs for manufacturing a product, which is FAR more commercially sensitive and of higher interest to our competitors than our air travel spend then I see absolutely no reason why I shouldn't understand how our air travel contracts work. After all the company asks me first and foremost in the travel policy to spend money rationally and as if it were my own.

Qantas, for one, shows the discounted rate on the air tickets that we purchase (SQ does not, UA does but in a semi-opaque manner). So there's two.

It is not enough for an employee to "know" unless it is enforced with an iron fist, in which case the employee won't travel or will leave. Either way it is stupid.

Edit: oh and I'm aware of one high profile, well known, household name type company in a similar industry to mine that does make all of this information available to their employees (including average travel spend per month on a city pair basis for benchmarking). Unsurprisingly their employees are happier to comply and their compliance is greater.

Almost every company I've worked for has published (internally, to us the travelers) the airline discounts. Probably for reasons ajnz suggests: otherwise people gripe, complain, or try to circumvent the preferred airlines when there's no good reason to.

Relatively flat domestic discounts in the 20-30% range are what I've seen at companies that do a lot of travel. International is usually more variable based on fare bucket purchased (10-15% on low-end coach up to 40% on premium cabin).

Most decent corporate travel sites have direct links to any status match programs they have as well as a direct link to book your vacation travel at a discount. I've never felt like the requirement to use a preferred airline is some big conspiracy to make my life hard...

And even worse: Indelaware writes: "The flight went the wrong direction, but rest assured that it connected just fine to a Y seat headed the desired direction."

Not only did he fly F, but his F seat was flying in the wrong direction, necessitating miles and miles of backtracking!!!

Yes, USD 569 is the limit that the Norwegian Government is supposed to reimburse their employees for hotels in DC, including compulsory taxes.

The official figures for 2012 are NOK 1900 for the USA, NOK 3500 for NYC and NOK 3300 for DC (USD 325, USD 599 and 565 respectively). In my experience it is not impossible to find good hotels at these rates (even though SFO and CHI probably should have had DC-rates.)

(Note: the USD 4 difference is due to change in exchange rate. The upper limit is not absolute, and no risk for the employee to be stuck with no reimbursement at all if total is a couple of bucks too high!)

But they then state that there is an exception, and presumably ask you to accept that there is a good reason for its existence. The company wouldn't be so crazy as to waste money on something with such a high effect on the overheads as corporate air travel, or be able to justify it to shareholders, so surely accepting it in this case makes sense. (I appreciate, having followed this thread from start to finish that there are numerous exceptions though...).

I don't hear many cases of employees being penalised for flying outside the corporate policy if they have a good reason though, although some of the policies on car rental and hotel chains I've read in this thread are quite shortsighted.