The academic research bodies in Canada used to (still do?) prohibit grant money being spent on alcohol. It leads to ridiculous situations where the bill has to be split and then sent to 2 different cost centres, or else split between the hosts personal accounts!!

With our current academic limit for entertaining guests, we go over if we order a bottle of wine, and the academic has to eat the extra costs themselves :(.

Probably won't be an issue in my new job :).

Thanks,

Dr. PITUK

Picky, picky, picky.

But it does have some real world consequences.

We can't reimburse for a parking ticket, for instance.

Now -- there used to be a regular meeting I had to attend in DC where the parking garage was more than the ticket for expired meter (meter time limit was less than the time of the meeting). And the garage was often full in any case. So it made sense to park there and pay the fine....

I could take a reimbursement for the fine, though the more expensive parking would have been OK.

The way I handle that situation is if it's significant I'll bonus the person for the grossed up amount in order to make them whole... but I can't do a tax free reiimbursement.

I've submitted parking tickets before :)

Are you saying that even if the consulting firm is willing to eat the difference between the fare that their travel policy allows (let's say full J) and the fare that your company permits (let's say Y), your company would still force the consultant to fly the lower class of service?

My thoughts too!

I used to travel regularly for a company I worked for from 1986 - 1993 and our hotel was paid for by the company and then we had a $50. per diem daily for food and incidentals. And this was a conservative company, not big spenders.

They paid for coach, but all of our flying was domestic, so I used miles to upgrade.

I work for a consulting major and tend to fly fully flexible economy or business because of the likelhood of having to change things at short notice.

Hotels tend to be solid Hiltons and Marriotts and the like. One of the benefits of being abroad is that with premium hotel status and lounge access, per diems do go further.

A life on the road has many drawbacks, but I earned over 1 Million miles last year.

I run a small consulting firm. We negotiate our travel arrangements with our clients. They typically are first domestically and business internationally except for short flights (2 hours). For the two founders of the firm, we sometimes do first internationally as well, but negotiate this up front. We typically stay at the decent hotel that is nearest to the client office. Ocassionally, a firm has a strict policy on travel -- all officers fly coach in the US. If the CEO flies coach, so do we. On the other hand, one client is willing to pay for my family or my partner's family to fly to Australia when we come work with them, because we are pretty busy and it is an awfully long trip.

Ocassionally, a client asks us to use their travel agent to get their negotiated discount (and thus their airlines) if their travel agent can get a deal that is better than what we can get and doesn't cause a big inconvenience. Last year, I flew BA a lot as a result. [I am actually surprised that more clients don't do this, but am glad that they don't]. The main client that does this is in the Fortune 10 and remarkably about half the time, we can get an equally good business class fare through our travel agent/Kayak etc. This same client in our most recent contract decided that they wouldn't reimburse for the minibar (but would for room service) and didn't want to reimburse for laundry (but gave in on this). It didn't have to do with us, but still seemed awfully silly.

We have no real limits on meals, but generally try to be reasonable.

Our firm's policies are pretty simple - we are employee owned and have around 200 employees, probably 1/3 travel at least a few days each month, but very few people travel more than 12-13 days each month. 95% of our work is for domestic government agencies.

1. If your customer has travel policies and you weren't able to negotiate a lump-sum contract instead of a cost-based contract, you have to follow their rules. That usually means keeping to the state or federal government rate on hotels, even if hotels won't offer you the rate as a consultant.
2. No buying domestic F tickets unless it's the cheapest option (as some Y-up fares can be from time to time). We have very few overseas projects, and airfare terms on those are generally contract specific.
3. Don't be stupid.

That's it. I've been with them for twelve years in two cities. I've flown my preferred airline probably 85% of the time, Southwest another 10% (for walk-up tickets on flights under 500 miles when the majors are out of matching capacity or only have a CRJ-200), and have never had a middle seat. These days, my group's client location profile lines up best with Hilton, our target hotel is a Homewood Suites (suburban), Embassy Suites (urban), or Hampton (rural). I'll still use Priceline for some cities on fixed price projects, but not as much as I used to during the early days when hotel managers were downright clueless and gave the rooms away.

I rent full size cars, or an SUV if it's within 10%, but I rent from any one of five different major companies (Hertz, Budget, National, Thrifty, Avis) depending on the city and the deal. Dinners tend to depend on the team but probably average out to $35/night at client sites, and $20/night when visiting other offices - receipts needed for $25+. No reimbursement for tips, laundry, newspapers, etc. $40/month towards cellphone usage, iPass for wireless hotspots such as airport lounges, and any in-room HSIA charges.

The only annoying rule we have imposed upon us by our auditors is that you can spend $35 on dinner, but you can't spend $15 on a baseball ticket and $10 on dinner during the game. I enjoy going to minor league baseball and hockey games, but I always end up having to eat that out of my own pocket.

The lower per diem's today can also be attributed to growing competition. If 3 firms are bidding on a single offer and they want to lower costs, the first thing they're going to lower is the consultants' per diems. After that, comes the consultants' accomodations, rental car agreements, etc.

I'm sure many have faced this issue in the last 5 years. Especially those that are more on the IT/ERP side.

There are so many differences in travel policy from one firm to the next. I guess that I should probably consider myself lucky that I can choose my own airline, rental car company, book my own tickets, etc.

I am not a consultant, neither I work for consulting firm... main points of travel policy are:
- economy air travel without exceptions (lowest fare for non-stop or most direct routing, you don't have to accept stopovers).
- reimbursement of actual meal amount within guidelines (geo specific). "meals" includes all edible and drinkable (alcohol, including minibar is also included within limits). limits are not enforced very strictly (guess if daily allowance will be $75 it would be ok to spend $30 one day and $100 another day - as long as total within the guidelines)
- economy car with automatic transmission and a/c.
- there is a list of hotels/chains you can chose from for every location
- you can not book anything yourself, even if it will be cheaper. everything has to be booked through agency.
- employee can chose upgrade your flight/car or overspend on your meal provided employee pays the difference.
- calls home considered valid business expense, within reason.
- all miles/points belong to employee.
- newspapers, lounges, spa visits :) and other non-travel items can not be expensed.
AX

Yes. Our in-house travel office books all trips for our own staff and the consultants, all adhering to the same travel policy. So far nobody has had a problem with that.

I get 45 euros per diem in Europe, 45 dollars in asia, and for some reason 80 dollars in Nigeria - where there is nothing to spend it on. We used to get $100 for Russia until accounting noticed how popular it was.

The (very) small firm I worked at had the following policies:

Per Diems at US Govt GSA rates
Full service hotel closest to site
Coach for all airfare (incl. international, but we rarely flew outside of the US)
Acela Express for rail (we took a lot of NJ to DC trips)
Car service to airport/train station (we had a negotiated rate)
Cabs from airport to hotel
Rental car if justified by travel needs on site

The only problem I can ever remember was when we "outstayed" a client. We were consultants to a larger consulting firm that was hired by the US Soc. Sec. Admin. When doing work at Soc. Sec. HQ (south suburbs of Baltimore) our client (the larger firm) stayed at a run down motel down the street from the site while we stayed at an Embassy Suites out near BWI airport. They were not happy.

No per diems for me. Actual expenses. I've yet to have any expense questioned.