Emma1420

Our travel policy has always been the lowest economy ticket available. However, for 2009 we had our meal stipend reduced to $30 a day down from $70. Its gone back up now thank goodness, but I ended up taking food with me on some trips as I knew I would spend more than the $30 on one meal let alone three.

Often1

1. Many of these fall into the trap of well-minded small-mindedness. Others are rooted in common sense but sometimes work a hardship.

2. Here is what we do:

A. We don't preset spending and we don't require the use of prefered carriers, hotels or car rental companies. But, our corporate TA site does have a pop-up form which needs to be completed when non-prefered carriers are used or a flight is booked in F when it doesn't meet F criteria (by position, distance, etc).

B. Some savings are not self-evident. For instance, we require the use of issued corporate Amex cards, but our TA is equipped to "strip" air and rail charges off the card and send them straight to the accounting software. All that the individual sees is the charge information and $0.00 on the monthly statement. This automated accounting interface is a substantial cost savings.

C. We monitor the reasons people list for spending more than they should or using non-prefered carriers. Those who pop up as "regulars" are counseled. Sometimes it's just a matter of a series of trips. Sometimes, it's been bad judgment.

D. We don't look at meal expenses to see who had how much to drink, but when a person starts to spend way too much, someone may look at the tab to see how it got to where it was.

In the end, if you treat your people like dirt, they will treat you like dirt. The good people will move on and you will be left with the dregs. But, the real key is that you explain your policies. There are sometimes good reasons for doing things in a way which is not apparent to all. While an employer does not need to walk through every minor change in policy, it really does help when you explain to your people the basics of why you do things the way you do. Yes, doing it a different way may occasionally be cheaper, but overall, it may be better to do it another way. Spending the 5 mins. to explain it, pays dividends.

CaptainMiles

All travel must be booked through company travel portal. It is programmed such that to not ticket automatically but instead punt to manager for approval before ticketing.

Trouble is, on weekends managers are not around, and unticketed reservations can only be held for 24 hours, so by the time Monday came around the reservation was gone and often the fare was higher.

So they changed it. If you book air between Mon morning and Friday at 4pm (time of booking, not time of flight), it went to manager. Otherwise, it would auto ticket.

Then people picked up on this, and started booking Friday after 4 or on the weekends.

Then managers caught this, and started asking their people to book on weekends so they would not have to be bothered with approvals.

rwmiller56

LOL!

PICA

Thankfully I've not experienced any of the above but have worked at clients where they have had room sharing policies. The policy did not apply to me, or I would have taken the next flight home!

Materdei

Wow, you guys are making me really appreciate my company's travel policy.

Really?

I suspect the thing my company does that is a waste of money with the intent to save money is that we use Carlson-Wagonlit for our travel.

I travel frequently to London and through the travel agency's site the ticket is ordinarily $5k - $6k (business class). Since my travel budget is limited I've learned to go to kayak.com, find tickets for sub $3K, call the travel agency and give them the details. They always match the price. I'm the only one that I know of who does this so you can imagine the waste company-wide.

angatol

.....

vmsea

I worked in policy compliance before and dealt with Travel & Entertainment expense policies as well..
You may think a policy is "ridiculous"..but the problem is, if you don't spell rules out, people will exploit it.. "use common sense" - great idea but the problem is, people purposely will not do that for personal gain.

Even with strict policy, people still do not comply.

Oh and people might think "omg.. on our corporate site it cost $3K for a flight, but i can find that same flight for 20% cheaper!"..
yes you can.. but do you realize the company gets a substantial rebate on ALL travel bookings at a corporate level? so you might be wasting a few hundred here.. but trust that overall, the company is getting it back for the most part..
Further, by using a standardized booking portal/platform, the admin cost decreases (consistency in itinerary, no weird oddball flights, etc).

There are many factors than just pure cost of a flight ticket or hotel room in setting T&E policies..

Often1

While there are certainly reasons to prohibit the use of certain carriers, I think that the new breed of corporate contract is based on a discount, not a rebate because many companies are billing back to a client. This means that what the employee sees on the ticket is actually what the employer pays and bills to the client.

Yaatri

Wirelessly posted (Samsung Galaxy S: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.6; en-us; SGH-T769 Build/GINGERBREAD) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1)

I can think of two things, none saved money though.
Engineers amd scientists, who were allowed to travel business class or first when their flying time exceeded six hours were asked to travdl in coach while members of the union -- welders, plumbers anf fitters ontinued to travel first ot business.

Overseas per diem was set to a flat $60 even for places lile London.

1kBill

At one company I worked at, movies in the hotel room were considered a personal expense and therefore non-reimbursable. But "beverages" were reimbursed, so you could sit a bar all night long and drink yourself silly and have the company pick up the tab.

pinworm

One of the reasons I quit my prior company! They basically consolidated all travel to pref. carriers/hotels/cars thinking they were getting a corp discount that would save them money.

This made expenses go up of course.

Even with the sudden "Enterprise Rental Car" only for example, we would pay 175 for a 3 day mid size car. Wheras I could and did search around for bargains and ended up paying only 75 for a 3 day.

Hotels were the same thing. They would get (UGH) Hampton at 110 a night..whereas I would use Hotwire and stay at a 5 star for 80.

They also enforced stupid rules, such as not staying over a weekend. At one point, I realized I could save the company 1000 dollars by staying over a weekend in LHR because it was 3200 for the weekend (Fri, Sat, Sun) flights and 320 for the weekday flights..even with extra hotel and food this was a 700 savings. But no..rules are rules..couldn't do it.

Prior to all this, I would come in under budget and fly F, stay in 5 stars, and drive full size cars. After the changes, I would fly coach even internationally for MORE money, stay in dumps, and drive compacts and STILL mysteriously end up over budget.

agehall

My company has a ton of rules for travel but a few things stand out.

If I buy an airline ticket costing more than approx $600, it has to be approved by finance and not just my manager. (70% of my trips are bought less than 48h before departure and includes at least one leg that is 8h+ - guess how many of my tickets that are less than $600...) They sometimes suggest we should use cheaper tickets without regard to time spent travelling or at which airport you end up.

The other thing that just kills me, is that we use a third grade approach to save on travel - we minimize each line on the expense report. A great example was this week when I was visiting our HQ. I was told our rate at the closest hotel was all sold out so I was booked into another hotel that was cheaper but a lot further away. The end result - total cost went up as I now had to take a cab back and forth to the office.

Another funny story was when I was part of a team that had to go to Lagos, Nigeria. I booked myself into the Radisson as that is one of the best hotels there. A colleague of mine then asked our travel agency where she should stay and they insisted on putting her in the Ibis claiming it's a really nice hotel. While that might be true, it's next door to the airport and unusable if you have meetings downtown - the drive is a killer and anyone who has been in Lagos would know this.

thelark

you realize that not everybody is a consultant, right?

medic51vrf

This isn't travel related per se, but during the GFC I was told I could no longer have business cards because "if I did I'd only give them away to people"!

I didn't bother explaining that business cards were SUPPOSED to be given away to people.

BTW a $20 box of cards usually lasted me over a year....