I have been tasked with writing our company's travel policy. We're a small enough place that the general attitude is to trust peoples' common sense and judgement. So, I'm keeping it short and simple. I'd appreciate any advice, however, of anyone out there who has done this before. If anyone has an example of a travel policy I could peruse, that would be great.

No, I'm not going to put in "all employees fly paid F".

Though I may put in the draft that the company will pay for J/C on flights longer than six hours. I don't think we have any such flights but it would be interesting to see what they say...

As you say, common sense is the best approach. Some other things to chew over:

- fly in the same class as your client if travelling with them
- depending on your general demeanour, Y for short haul, J (US dom F) for 5+ hours, intl F probably not needed
- spouse travel?
- who is paying (if client direct, do they have a better J policy that you can piggyback on?)
- out of policy requests requires a manager sign-off
- times of travel (weekend, late at night)
- good quality hotels that are appropriate (not Motel 6, not Grand Palace)
- consider a policy where savings against travel policy are shared with employees
- mostly: don't treat employees either as slaves or idiots, it usually backfires

It's an interesting assignment. To some extent, your travel policy needs to be at least competitive with similar companies in your industry. OTOH, a more generous policy or one that gives the employees more control can result in business travelers who perform better and are more loyal to the company.

Do people book their own travel, pay for it with their own credit cards, and then file for reimbursement? Do you have corporate travel contracts or preferred providers for airlines/hotels/rental cars?

Will the company pay for lounge memberships, seat fees, checked bag fees, etc.?

Are employees required to travel at inconvenient times or connect to save money?

Do you reimburse actual expenses or per diem? Under what conditions is alcohol reimbursed? If actual, any guidelines on bell person tips, valet parking tips, laundry and dry cleaning expenses?

I assume that the company self insures for additional expenses during IROPs and provides health coverage, including emergency air evcuation, if foreign travel is required.

Do you encourage car service to/from airport, taxi, Uber etc., public transportation, or driving? If driving, any rules about airport parking depending on the length of trip?

Can or should emloyees spend an extra day or two at the destination in order to save substantially on airfare? How about arriving a bit early to be well rested before major meetings?

ADDED: I suspect that your travel policy needs to be in compliance with the tax code, not only from the viewpoint of being to deduct employees' travel expenses from income for your corporate (or whatever) income tax but also so that you don't need to track and report reimbursements to employees that the IRS considers to be income. [Fortunately most state tax codes are similar to the federal rules.] If you're a publicly held company, you also want to be in compliance with reasonable accounting standards. You might eventually want to have a lawyer and an accountant look over the proposed policy.

Perhaps this advice from a large association of corporate travel managers will help:

World’s Largest Association of Corporate Travel Managers to Members: Authorize First and Business Travel More Often and Look for Hotels with Butler ServiceThis link is to an online source to which I contribute and/or have a financial interest.

ASSCAM? Someone, somewhere, is laughing themselves silly that they built this acronym.

All international travel outside North America is business class. All other is coach.

Employees must book lowest cost ticket for the class. Paying extra for upgradeable fares not allowed.

Side trips and stop overs for personal use are allowed but the employee must pay all costs greater than the lowest costs per class ticket.

Companions are allowed as long as it is appropriate to the job. All costs to be borne by employee.

Employees are allowed to keep all frequent flyer benefits for their own use.

Restrict airlines to be used. No super cheap like PIA or Aeroflot but no hi-so airlines like SQ or Emirates. Last big company I worked for said US airlines only if available and Star Alliance only.

Instead of nickel-diming for things like luggage carts and taxis, allow a $50 per trip allowance for miscellaneous.

Limit the hotels that can be used.

$75 per day for meals without receipts. If greater than that, supply receipts.

It's a good idea to work with a credit card company and have every traveler use the company credit card that can be attached directly to your expense system. That way each employee simply logs into your system and assigns an expense code to each charge. No need for receipts. All air fare, hotels and any meal over $25 must be charged to the card. Plus instead of employees using a card that gets them extra points and other benefits, the company gets that from the CC company (1-2% kickback).

It was an April Fool's Day post that wasn't funny 11.75 months ago, and age hasn't made it any funnier.

I've written many T&E policies and the above are great. You can google policies online for a framework. I'm a member of GBTA (global business travel association) and the Philly BTA. There's also the Institute of Corporate Travel Executives to look at their website.

Have an opening statement to indicate responsibilities, who owns and administers the policy compliance and procedures for non-compliance.

A few others to consider:

Key Personnel travel - Sr Executives can't fly together or more than X from same dept or in a reporting relationship.

Use of Uber or Airbnb was not allowed due to risk exposure in case of accidents, issues, etc. I myself was injured in an Airbnb house on a loose step and others don't have fire exit info or other safety features and the company is required to keep employees safe.

We used private car service so folks didn't jump into a rental car after long flights

Combination of Business/Personal trips - the IRS has rules on when it becomes a compensation event so I had to review prior to booking the planned trip. Personal days have to be less than business days.

Identify preferred travel agent, corporate card, vendors to use. Who is entitled to airline club fees (we stated road warriors who travel X times a month/quarter/year and also by title). Do you pay for Global Entry for international travels and/or Pre-Check?

Indicate how many days in advance to book travel, file T&E claims and what happens if violations of policies.

We used cash only for tips and infrequent items, everything else went on credit card.

One firm had a hotel limit of $250 a night except NYC, Chicago, SFO which were $350 a night. You can get that detailed if you want.

We used good judgement on meals and were limited with alcohol.

Liaise with your Insurance or HR folks to include the BTA (Business Travel Accident) details in the policy.

Hope this helps

The only thing I would modify is allow employees to pay the annual fee from AMEX so they can keep the points. Otherwise they don't get to keep the points.

Thanks all. There is an existing expense policy, which I don't believe it's in my remit to change. We have Elan Visa cards for most people, but anyone who routinely needs to expense more than $5k/month gets a corporate Amex Platinum. Receipts are required for every expense no matter how small, which is annoying. But there's a lot of good stuff in this thread - thanks! Keep em coming.

My old company was like this. Also, anything that you paid with your personal CC they wanted the screenshot of the online activity or statement for the CC. Even for like a $5 parking charge. It was madness.

Most things I'd like to include in a policy have already been listed.

What do you think for meal limits? The three companies I've worked for, our meal limits were $50, $55, and $90 a day. I thought $90 was a bit needless, but $50 can be tough if you're in a high cost city like NYC or SF and time/location constrained.

That bit about the personal card is crazy. Ugh.

I thought E&Y had the best policy when I worked there: no receipts needed for expenses $75 and lower (later lowered to $25). Meal limits were set by the client, but were usually left up to your judgment. My favorites were straight per diems (usually about $75) since there were no receipts needed and you could just expense the full per diem.

When I was at Gamesa (not a consulting firm) we were held to $10 for breakfast, $25 for lunch, and $50 for dinner. Our CEO once remarked to me that $50 for dinner was a bit tight, since you'd easily get there with an appetizer, entree and glass of wine.

Yeah. My Big 4, pretty much anything charged to the corporate Amex was no receipt required, or at least I never charged anything expensive enough to hit the limit. No receipts required for cash/personal CC expenses <$25. For taxis the cutoff was <$75.

Hmm, in all of the European Companies I worked for (and two of them were 120k+ employee companies) you had to have receipts for every expense. Even for the 1.10€ for a tram ticket.

I lost quite a bit of money on my travels since I just couldn't find a manageable way to store all the receipts and find them when I was preparing my expense reports or I was so annoyed photographing/scanning all those small snippets that I just said... f*** it, I won't spend 10 hours in front of my desk to claim back 50€.

Officially they said it was required by the tax authorities (Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Sweden) while I do not believe that to be entirely true. I think it was that they counted on the employees being lazy and saving money this way.

Now I'm working a freelancer and put in my contracts that I will charge the per diem rates as posted by the US State Department since that list is updated quite frequently and has most of the places in the world in it with reasonable amounts.

All of my clients are fine with that and so far I did not get any issues with the tax authorities for not providing all the receipts.

The first start-up company I joined in a position requiring regular travel had a travel policy about 2 pages long. It contained about a dozen ground rules with the terms "reasonable" and "...with Management approval" repeated several times. It worked well for us.

As that company grew, and as I've joined larger start-up companies, I've seen increasingly detailed travel policies. None of them have been better for the employees, and none of them have really been better for the company, either. Stingy policies, such as low per-diem rates for meals and receipts required for every small expense, irritate good employees and save only tiny amounts of money relative to what's likely being spent poorly elsewhere in the company anyway.