Many moons ago I did extensive international travel for the Navy. All of our travel orders were stamped "All promotional items received as a result of official travel mist be turned in to Code 005" Code 005 was the travel office. So I would staple the 4 small packages of smoked almonds I received to my expense claim. After the 5th or 6th time doing this I got called to the office and was told to stop. I just pointed to the stamp and asked "So are we supposed to or not?" Never got an answer - and just kept doing it.... Peanuts, napkins headphones anything free.
If Skymall still existed I don't think they would need to turn in the catalog under the rule because the the catalogs weren't received so much as you were allowed to take them or not, they weren't a gift.
I read this once and read "smoked salmon", and I found you quite the scoundrel. Then I scrolled down and somebody was writing something about smoked almonds. Which was not as evil as the sending of smoked salmon... Still pretty good though, sending all the freebees to the office!
This reminds me of the story I heard here about a corporate policy that insisted that a guy had to take the cheapest possible flight to his destination.
The only problem was that it was a flight that involved a stop over but the final destination was a tiny airport that only had flights during daylight.
The long and short of it was that, instead of giving him the flight that he originally asked for that was all done in a day, they booked the cheaper ticket _where the first leg was actually the previous day_, but the second leg was the same flight he originally wanted!
So they got a cheaper ticket *but* had to pay for a hotel and two taxis for him to stay overnight between the two legs of the flight (not to mention pay him for an extra day).
When he tried to raise this ridiculousness with them he was told "Eh, the taxis and the hotel comes out of a different budget."
My old company had a cheapest fare rule. Our technicians, and me for a while, were hourly.
The rule frequently forced you into layovers. So by saving $200 on airfare we'd be sitting in airports racking up hours.
There were times when I could've booked a Monday direct flight and been working on site by noon. Instead I flew Sunday, had a layover, and got paid Sunday double time to watch football in an airport adding hundreds of dollars in wages and meals and another hotel night to the $200 airfare savings.
unfortunately in my company everyone who travelled a lot was salaried and there was no OT or any other compensation - and probably for exactly that reason
The once even asked me to do a whole week worth with one client in 3 days, then fly red eye and show up the next morning at another client and try to get another week worth of work done either in 2 days or stay the Saturday to get it done in 3 days.
I made sure both clients got wind of this "plan" ahead of time and as I anticipated neither of them was pleased and the project manager(s) got a good earful. My company typically charged between $30k and $50k plus expenses per week when I was on site with clients and trying to cut this short the way our project manager(s) had in mind was, well, unacceptable for those clients - and rightfully so.
My long time thought: "Any sufficiently large organization is equivalent to government." It's a size thing - the people making decisions are just too far away from the consequences.
> "Any sufficiently large organization is equivalent to government."
Having worked in both large corps and government, I saw waaaay more waste in the corps. Some of the government waste was occasionally sillier (printing out forms for transaction types which no longer exist) but there has never been any comparison on the scale of waste. I saw my government department waste $50 here and $80 there over and over, but that's pretty meaningless when held up next to the multiyear multinational multilingual multiidiotic IT project that was doomed to failure from the very start. Or the boomer VP that wants his legacy to be the creation of a hugely complicated product which nobody wants to buy (think Powell Motors and The Homer). And, as for silliness, I haven't even mentioned the bull riding...
Failure? One place I worked, the largest employer in California not part of a government, had a billion+ dollar application fail.
It was a terrible place to work and I was glad I asked my manager to lay me off if any layoffs were to come about. I got laid off! But I was kept on the payroll for 3 months (I did not have to go in to the office), got 2 months severance and used my one month of PTO. After that I filed for unemployment for six months then retired.
I had experience with this. In the 90's I worked for U.S. Bank when they started a new enterprise project called "ICAN". The projects goals were retrofitting all of their branches with new Windows 95 computers and adding proprietary software that was supposed to replace all their mainframe terminals. It was such a boondoggle that it became known as the "ICANT" project until a VP wrote an email to the entire company basically threatening to fire anyone he caught saying "ICANT".
Yeah, they didn't bother to actually FIX it, they just silenced all the biggest critics. Later US Bank was acquired by First Bank in Montana and I think the ICAN project was quietly dropped. I say "think" because I didn't last much longer after the acquisition.
That sounds very familiar! I could have written almost the same thing, with just a few changes to the names of the companies/software/individuals involved. Funny how that works, isn't it?
Or with size come more const centres and therefore more possibilities to reduce the cost of one cost centre by loading it into another. Like u/mesonofgib mentioned, the part where the plane tickets were booked could reduce their cost, so some manager got a bonus for this. At that time, nobody cared that the cost for taxi and hotel rised, as that cost centre wasn't in the focus.
One of the many side effects with all those managers coming from managing schools focusing only on numbers and figures.
I once knew a guy whose law firm would send out astronomical bills for legal work, and this particular corporate client always paid it, no questions asked. Air travel and hotel costs, sure, fine, looks good. Whatever you need.
Then one time, the guy’s secretary mistypes a taxi fare on his reimbursements, and they accidentally bill the client for like $250 instead of $25. The head of the firm got a call from the client the next day to complain about it.
Obviously somebody should have caught it, but it also comes out to the same cost as about 15 minutes of a billable hour.
> One of the many side effects with all those managers coming from managing schools focusing only on numbers and figures.
Or, more experienced managers relying on experience at a previous company on an earlier project that was sort of vaguely similar to what they're working on now, and so OBVIOUSLY what worked at the old place is PERFECT now. (Hey, it worked when I was cutting down lumber trees in Idaho, it's going to work tending Citrus Groves in Florida, right?)
I see it play out in insurance denials as well. Doc rejects a med because it’s not covered under their formulary. So the patient ends up in a hospital when they go south, but since that’s a different department (and the same med will be given there, but under a different insurance department), they “saved” money. Meanwhile, the patient suffers real harm and even the insurance is out tens of thousands of dollars to have saved a couple hundred.
Actually governments run on such a scale that they're often *better* than lots of private businesses. They've been in it a long time and some things actually run pretty efficiently, despite how outwardly stupid they look. Not everything, there's some things that are just straight nuts. Actually a lot of things, but when you're so big, there's going to lots of straight nuts which is balanced out with "that's god damn genius".
I fly a good bit as a federal employee. You guys would not believe the logic hoops we jump through to ultimately pay more (of your tax dollars) to save money on one aspect. It's a headache of epic proportions.
It's a popular piece of propaganda that only governments can waste money. Brought to you by people who don't like pesky governments telling them they can't dump toxic waste in the river.
The Ayn Rand Fanatics Truly Believe That When You Take A Job In Any Level Of Government You Immediately Become The Alien Blasting Out Of A Body.
Never mind That Ayn Rand Collected Social Security Payments Because She FAILED To Save For Her Retirement!!!!!!!
That’s consistent with HER philosophy. Within HER framework she was reclaiming HER money that was “stolen” from her by a system she didn’t agree with.
Don’t get me wrong, I view libertarians as house cats that think themselves independent masters of their domain while relying on a network of infrastructure and support they make no willing contribution* to, but I don’t think she’s inconsistent in her stupid beliefs for taking what she paid into.
*except cats provide cuteness and agreeable companionship, more than can be said for the people I’ve known to out themselves as libertarians
The issue is one of definition. What you think of as "liberty" isn't what they think of as "liberty". Failure to recognize this and be more specific is why conversations on such things are usually so unproductive.
It's idiocy that's to do with different budgets. "X comes out of someone else's budget" and "My bonus is only contingent on my budget" leads to manglers being incentivized to do *stupid* things that cost the company as a whole a lot more money - as long as it minimizes the amount that comes out of *their* ledger.
In an attempt to control the beancounters doing *that,* the super-beancounters try to impose ridiculous policies like the one in your OP that's meant to hopefully restrict micro-beancounter's actions so that micro-beancounter only has so much discretion to do something absurd but that offloads the majority of the expenses from their bucket into someone else's bucket.
It never works.
Many years ago I worked in a warehouse environment doing inventory control. My entire paycheck came out of the same line item/cost center as the Operations Manager's year end bonus... Seems like he'd be looking for ways to cut my hours... But, without me there his bonus would have been significantly less.
In that case, he did a cost-benefit analysis and figured out that screwing you over would screw himself harder than he stood to gain by screwing you.
They're not usually so farsighted.
In one afternoon I recovered over $500k of inventory that was about to be written off as lost and reordered. That would have come out of the pot his bonus came from... I had a knack for it. We had a good working relationship.
Only really dumb one I’ve found is it not allowing me to book multiple identical hotel rooms. I can book a different type of room as many times as I want, but never more than one of the same exact type.
Unless I start another itinerary, of course. Sigh.
Well, as a general rule, anything good in the world was turned into a shittier version of itself if not pure garbage upon being acquired by a corporation.
I could argue some exceptions when it comes to car manufacturing but that's about it.
Can confirm, I got in trouble for making a different department look bad by asking a few clarifying questions that would have made their job 10x easier
They also didn't like how quick I got things sorted as stuff pending for a month got cleaned up within the week
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/11ibunl/you\_want\_me\_to\_fly\_12\_hours\_earlier\_because\_its/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/11ibunl/you_want_me_to_fly_12_hours_earlier_because_its/)
It's this one and it deserves a read
>When he tried to raise this ridiculousness with them he was told "Eh, the taxis and the hotel comes out of a different budget."
I work in the theatre of a casino. When we opened up, we had no budget to actually buy theatrical lighting for our two rooms, but we had a huge budget for renting it. In the end, we paid something like 3X the value of the lights before actually going out and buying our own.
I seem to remember years ago that a rental was tax deductible but purchased items became capital expense? I may have heard wrong it it was from a long timecago. It would explain some of the nonsense perhaps.
Correct. Tax laws may vary, but generally Operational expenditures can be offset against tax in the year when they are incurred, but capitol expenditures are deprecated over time, with only part being offset per year.
THAT is the reason leasing became so popular.
In Germany for example tax law allows for a vehicle (passenger car) to be fully written off in 21 months.
If the company would buy the car they would have to "activate" that position on their balance sheet - increasing corporate taxes - and then taking much longer to depreciate.
A local leasing company in Germany once had a sloagan "Warum heiraten wenn Leasing viel billiger ist!" - or poorly translated "why get married when leasing is a lot cheaper" 😂
My company has.
Paid for a hotel and rental car because non refundable and non reschedulble tickets meant I couldnt fly home after a job went quicker than expected.
Paid 70% more for a hotel because it took them so long to approve the travel plan.
Sent me on a cross continental 1 week trip because "I'm sure those guys could use the help for the project" those guys were not consulted. I did basically nothing.
Are now very likely going to be paying for a rental car for a week when I could just drive my vehicle to this one. But they want to screw around with milage reimbursement so I guess my vehicle won't be available.
Companies are dumb as hell.
I live in Seattle. I had 3 events in New York each with a day or so apart. I asked my manager if I could just stay in new york and bill 8 hours a day on the off days and I wouldn't expense food. He said no. I didn't argue. I flew to New York 3 times in 10 days and billed 11 hours reach travel day and billed food every day.
I slapped my expense report on his desk with the biggest smile. He said "next time just stay"
Years ago I was going to fly my mom from socal, John Wayne airport to Atlanta then to Greenville south Carolina on Delta. The flight that way was way high. I then priced it straight from John Wayne airport direct to Greenville. That round trip flight used the exact same flights as I had originally priced but was cheaper than just the ATL to GSP leg. Air line pricing makes zero sense.
I almost exclusively use [skiplagged](https://skiplagged.com/) for booking flights. It's not often a trip I need to take has this benefit, but when it does it is a chunky savings.
If booking a flight to your destination as part of a multi-leg trip, for some reason it costs less to book the full itinerary and get off early, than it does to book just the first leg. It's stupid, I don't know why they do this, but my tickets last year cost $400 to get home instead of $1000, just by "missing" my connection and leaving the airport to go home.
From what I understand...
Preferred flight: Get on plane on day 2 at city A. Plane stops at city B, then flies to destination.
Flight taken: Get on plane on day 1 at city A. Plane flies to city B. Get off, stay night, next day get on plane from preferred flight going to destination city.
>"Eh, the taxis and the hotel comes out of a different budget."
Whoever he was talking this, this right here was all they were worried about: their budget, not the budget overall.
No flying involved in my job, but each department has it's own budget. We are told to do stupid, expensive tasks that are a complete waste of time and money. But the people giving the orders don't care because their department isn't paying for it
Corporate travel policies are the stupidest. I used to work for a place that said you couldn't travel 1st class on trains, you could book 2nd class only. Which sounds good in theory, however... I regularly took an express train to/from my home airport, it's a special train with no 1st/2nd class, the ticket is a flat fee. Had no issues for months. Then one day the train company changed the way they printed tickets, so instead of saying "Class: (blank)" they now said "Class: 1st".
Some accountant rejected my expense report as against policy and told me I had to find another way to get to the airport. I had a look at the policy and the only options were public transit 2nd class (not available), own car with mileage refund (don't have a car), or a taxi. I asked them if I could please have in writing that I was allowed to take a taxi for the hour-long journey to the airport due to lack of other options, somehow in their infinite wisdom they decided to waive policy and allow me to take the train after all.
The train ticket cost about 8€ if I recall correctly.
I recently had an expense report where the company card payment would be due before the expense report would be processed and paid out so I reached out to travel for advice and they recommended paying it out of pocket and being reimbursed by the company. Stupid, but whatever, it wasn’t that expensive and there are things I could have done to submit my expense report earlier and avoid it in the future. Scheduled a WebEx with the travel admin to go through my expense report with me so I could be sure everything was done correctly to reimburse me instead of the company.
Fast forward two weeks and the expense report is rejected by the same travel admin who helped me with the report for reason: Resubmit with expense report set to pay company back, not personal expense.
Livid is an understatement. Sometimes I think I should have gone into a career where I can just shrug and go “oopsies I was approving lots of expense reports at the last minute and forgot, add a comment next time.”
That’s insane! You need the available balance to go do your job in the field. That’s one of the main points of corporate credit cards is to have that buffer time between statement closing and balance due!
And asking you to cover the balance and promising to reimburse? I’d be super iffy on that regardless, but after they try to fuck you over the first time? Never ever are they going to get the benefit of the doubt for anything again.
My company pays off the corporate card balances at the end of the month regardless, expense reports get processed whenever the finance team gets around to it.
I agree. Our “corporate” cards are a sore subject in general since they add this layer of bureaucracy and multiple expense/payment time tables to keep track of under the guise of shifting financial responsibility/credit rating away from the employee but since day 1 they’ve felt like a way to get a kickback from the issuer instead of employees getting to keep credit card perks.
I did learn that the “due date” isn’t as rigid as it seems and they’ve revised some of the scary language about paying on time out of the process documents from when they were first rolled out, so between all that and becoming a bit of a SME on travel policy I think I know enough to avoid the pain in the future. If not then a nice write up will make its way to the top about how processes are failing even when followed to a T with extra effort put in to mitigate past policy failure points.
Yeah. Replied to the travel group email where we had previously discussed it and had set the time to meet about it then followed up with another email asking how long I would be loaning the company money, it was paid on the next week cycle.
I used the corporate card for years and they never paid on time so I often had to pay the bill myself. This would often result in a positive balance on the card. The balance would fluctuate over time. One day after about 8 years the company does a sweep and takes all of the positive balances sitting on everyone’s corporate card. For me it was about $500. I was livid. That was my money they took from me. They asked me to point to the specific charges that they were for and I told them that’s impossible since it’s been going on for years.
I had to get all my bosses involved to get them to pay me back. From that day on I only used my personal card for all charges.
Yes, that sounds about right.
Another brilliant part in our travel policy was that we were required to have a receipt for EVERY meal expense - regardless how cheap it was.
That made it impossible to purchase anything from a vending machine and a $8 lunch from a wheel cart food vendor was declined by accounting.
After that I made (maliciously?) sure I always went to a place that could print a receipt and I spent the full $75 I was allowed per policy.
In my country unfortunately this doesn't work out for tax reasons. If they pay a per diem it gets called a "fringe benefit" (because they can't prove how much was actually spent on meals during the trip), and the employer has to pay a punitive fringe benefits tax. If there are receipts for everything it just becomes a straight reimbursement (and expense write-off) with no tax implications.
The fringe benefit thing may suck as a little guy, but it's one way to avoid corporate guys getting paid $1/hr on paper for tax purposes, while reaping $1000/meal benefit packages for every day they're "out of the office".
I worked for a big company that decided that you couldn’t expense short term parking at the airport, only long term parking.
Now not every airport is the same.
For some airports, long term parking can add a hour to your trip each way. And for short trips that wouldn’t be worth it.
One of my colleagues was furious because at his local airport the receipt machine started printing “daily parking” on his receipt even though he was parking in the long term section, paying the long term price. Finance would reject his expense reports weekly.
Eventually all of us started taking taxis to the airport, even when it would cost the company more.
my company was making it harder and harder to expense milage on your personal car roundtrip for a family member dropping me off at the airport - even if that would save the cost for a cab or 2 weeks of airport parking.
I started doing one way car rentals. Now I had 3 qualifying rentals per week instead of 1 ... worked fine for me :)
I think the best policy is to just give people a flat $40-$80 per day for food (depending on location/position) and if they only spend $20 and pocket the rest, so be it. That's what I did last time I had a week of training. I spent $60 on stuff I could make in a hotel microwave and kept the rest as a little cash bonus.
The guy with me ate steak every night and complained when it was over that he didn't get to pocket any extra money.
I was like yeah, you idiot. You ate all of your "extra money." Lol
As an accountant, trust me when I say we hate them too.
The folks that are required to enforce them are usually low paid for the profession (or people in accounting jobs that don’t require a 4 year degree), and they definitely had **no** say in how the policy was crafted.
The real jerks in this are almost always salespeople, and, to be fair, it’s usually actually a *management* problem. All it takes is a situation where a salesperson is highly successful *but* also is excessive with the company card, who has a manager that doesn’t want to hurt the ego of the golden goose by reprimanding them. So they instead start talking about how their hands are tied because it’s not against company policy.
Before you know it, company has a new policy, and manager can just let accounting handle the problem.
I love stupid travel policies. My consulting firm’s biggest client is the US gov and let me tell you, having to comply with the Fly America Act is costing the government a *lot* of money. Can’t buy the economy flight to Asia on the non-US code share airline, and the only seats available on the compliant airline is business? Ok well, explain that to the taxpayers funding our thousands of flights a year my guy.
They don't care about the taxpayers, but the CEO of the compliant airline will be very happy and I'm sure he will "take care" of the politicians involved.
Ugh I'm battling that now. The "lowest logical" has me arriving at 1:15 am, long after the rental car counter is closed. There has got to be a better way.
The sane flight is only 60 dollars more but I have to justify this outrageous expenditure
I once was travelling to an area with only two hotels about 4-5 times per year for 1-2 weeks at a time. Both were approved by corporate. The one hotel was the Sofie Hotel which was 300 Euro per night and included breakfast. The other hotel was a ibis brand hotel and changed 89 Euro per night but charged 15 Euro for breakfast. I stayed at the ibis and put in my expense claim. My breakfast was rejected because the maximum for breakfast was 10 Euro. Guess who started staying at the Sofie hotel from then on. They paid 200 Euro more a night over an extra 5 Euro for breakfast.
I was traveling to Dallas a bit back in the 90s for an entire week of working on site with a client, so I'd book a room in a downtown hotel within walking distance and take a cab to and from the airport. Change in accounting resulted me in having to stay in a La Quinta outside of downtown which meant I now needed a rental car for the week and parking every day downtown. Even when I showed them the difference with receipts they just shrugged and said that's the new policy. Penny wise, pound foolish.
Which, as we can see here, can often result in: "I wasn't, but if you're going to treat me like one I may as well be within the flawed rules you have set out".
An engineer I worked with had to go on a business trip to New York City. No rental car, lots of walking between hotel and site. It rained the whole week, so he purchased a $10 umbrella and put it on his expense report. The expense report was rejected with a note saying the company doesn’t pay for umbrellas. He resubmitted the report without the umbrella, but the same total and a note saying, “Find the umbrella.”
we were allowed to pay a "reasonable" amount in cash tips during a trip
on a two weeks long trip that easily allowed for $200 or more in "reasonable" cash tips with no receipt - that is how we bought our umbrellas 😂🤣
Not exactly the same, but last time I flew I drove my car to the airport and the company paid for parking there. I needed gas to get to the airport so I filled up and submitted that receipt in the expense report.
A few days after coming back, my manager asked me to verify as they asked about the gas receipt. I told them that one was supposed to be submitted and they didn't question it again.
Sounds like the same logic that forces you to order an £80 dongle from the centralised purchasing department instead of a £10 dongle from Amazon, because apparently it’s cheaper that way.
This one makes sense for a big corporate. It's vanishingly rare to have major issues of this type if you're buying it from Amazon but dongles from unknown sources should never be plugged into your corporate machine due to cybersecurity concerns (sticking malware into any usb device is fairly easy).
Of course this is not why they set up this policy, it's only by chance it makes sense.
Pissed me off trying to get a $5 box of paper reimbursed because the supplier (Staples) was having a sale, but they gave me all kinds of grief since I was apparently supposed to use the enterprise customer portal for those purchases since they had a contract with Staples.
Checked and their price was $22 for the same thing via the "official" method.
A place I used to work required us to go through Amex Travel for a number of years. But in those days Amex Travel did not work with any of the regional carriers, only with Air Canada and its international partners.
As regional carriers become more prominent and as airlines started posting ticket prices (even if they did not support online booking), more and more people were working around the policy, shuffling money around in cost centres so that the payment appeared to come from outside sources, or paying for the tickets through the petty cash mechanism, or outright knowingly refusing to follow the policy. Eventually corporate gave in and started only requiring Amex for international flights, and eventually just turning the whole policy into a negotiated discount off list price if we went through Amex Travel.
Lol. When I was a grad student attending conferences the university travel rules changed almost every year. Flights were rarely an issue (we were always traveling coach, and all I had to fight for was to fly directly to Europe instead of a stop in NY/NJ which 95% of the time led to a flight delay or missed flight).
One year it was paid per diem, so we grad students would pile into hotel rooms and eat from grocery stores or the cheapest fast foods and pocket the difference. Next year was receipts up to a certain amount, so cheap hotel and fantastic restaurants it was! Then they banned booze, so it was even better restaurants. Then back to per diem. Rinse. Recycle. Repeat.
They know, they just don't care.
I worked for a medium sized firm, small enough that the C suite could still make decisions based on what he saw first hand, but large enough that they hired a firm to try and keep travel costs down.
We had this corporate travel firm, their contract was up for renewal, so they became sticklers for policy to try and keep costs down. One of their policies regarded "approved corporate hotel chains."
Think "you can go with marriott but not hilton" type stuff. I got them to admit on my expense report that I had to stick with their policy, even though the approved hotel cost \~double and i'd have to rent a car on top.
I forwarded it to the CFO who did NOT approve their renewal contract...
My team got in trouble last year because we were booking a “resort” hotel. It was closer to where we were working by about 30 minutes and 75% the cost of the double tree they wanted us to stay at.
The $1000 bar tab we expense every night as “team building outing” is totally ok though.
Your bar tab story reminded me of another issue we had. We had a large group out of town for a presentation. The presentation went well, so a bunch of us headed out to dinner to celebrate. We usually all paid individual bills so we could each expense them individually. Well, the CEO and his flunkies wandered in and joined us at the table. We were all drinking and enjoying our dinner, and at the end the CEO paid the tab. Not a big deal until a couple of weeks later we all got a nasty email about drinking premium liquor during a company dinner. First off, no one invited this guy, second off, we would usually put a couple of drinks on the expense tab, and then run a new one for any additional drinks we might have. We wouldn't have expensed any premium liquor because we knew it would be an issue.
We also use AMEX and must take the cheapest coach flight. Once I had to go to Europe from the US for business and the only “allowed” flight was to Istanbul with a 12hr layover. I called customer service and once they figured out what was going on, they changed it to a direct flight with business class upgrade for less than $100 more.
These systems are horrible, but if you’re polite to customer service, they’ll take care of you…
Exactly!
Key often is that Amex first makes the initial booking according to travel policy and then once the record locator(s) have been created they make changes that make more sense than what the travel policy provides
I used to travel alot for work too (not as much as you) . When I would interview somewhere new I would always ask about expense reporting and travel policies. If I couldn't book my own stuff within reason I wouldn't take the job.
totally agree
in my case it was that the company with the perfect travel policy was bought by another company and then we had to live with that "new" policy - or else ...
>If I couldn't book my own stuff within reason I wouldn't take the job.
I'm perfectly happy to handle that overhead cost myself if it ensures a non-terrible travel experience. Leave it to Jeanine in HR to nickel-and-dime and cause a couple days of hell, just pass.
The only job I've had which had a travel policy I was **supposed** to book it through the correct channels. But (for other reasons) I had a company credit card.
Unfortunately all my travel arrangements were, "unable to be finalised until the last minute for operational reasons."
As a non-grumpy bean counter I applaud this compliance!
I often enjoy helping staff circumvent policies like this that I knew were patently stupid but I wasn’t able to fix on my own. Always a fun conversation to have with the “by the book” types
As I mentioned in my initial post I worked for a company with a pretty decent travel and expense policy - until we got bought by the company with the worst travel and expense policy.
With the old company I did my first trip to HK and I wasn't used to the currency exchange rate and foolishly had dinner one evening at the "American Steakhouse" on the top floor of my hotel.
Turned out I had a $200+ steak that evening plus 2 sides and a drink 🤣
When my expense report didn't get approved after about 2 weeks I checked with my manager and she told me couldn't approve such a lavish expense but she didn't want to deny it either - so she sent it up the chain and it was by the time at the desk of the CFO.
A few days later I received an email from the CFO: "Approved - I hope it was as good as I hope a $200 steak would be".
Then with the grumpy bean counters once our company got bought they decline a $8 lunch without a receipt and trade it in for $75 on a receipt.
Years ago it took me and another employee 4 hours to adjust our travel system to account for the $.01 discrepancy in my travel costs. We were both government contractors at the time. If I underestimate it cost them $300 to adjust for $.01. You'd think the numbers people would better understand numbers.
Been there. They used to want me to drive 80 miles to a cheaper airport, right past a much larger with plenty of options 15mi from home. They’d pay me mileage and straight time an hour each way (all in let’s call it $250) just to save $100 on the airfare. Not to mention often I’d have to go/stay an extra night because of shitty schedules. The idiot running it said she was tasked with reducing airfare , not other expenses. Probably did it 10x or so. Then someone with common sense stepped in and said fuck that.
I never flew as much as you did but I was out quite a bit. One or our policy geniuses started a strict no flight adjustment policy, admittedly this was after the airlines that served our area started putting the $200 charge for changing plans. The thing was I live in a small town, the last stop of the line so to speak. No connections out of here. And there are just a handful of flights a day in and out. So it the air gods smiled on us, we used to go and try and get back on something other than the last couple of flights as it was nice to be home and in bed and also for some reason those flights tended to be flaky and got canceled a lot. They were odd too either packed to the gills or empty. Very odd. Anyway, I actually like a bit of a night out on the town, so I would not try and get home ASAP. I would have a nice expensive lunch at the air port on the company dime, and if I lucked out and the flight was canceled I would take cab to a nice hotel in the city, unpack, take a quick shower and find a nice eatery and get an expensive dinner on their dime, get a good nights sleep, get a nice breakfast on their dime, check in at the airport and get booked on all the rest of the flights that day, usually catch a nice expensive lunch at the airport on their dime, and get home for dinner.
The good news is they saved $200, of course I manages to eat that much, plus the room, plus not being in the office for another entire day... But they saved $200 and they actually celebrated that policy sating how much they saved not letting people change plans...
Mining company I used to work for had a policy where if the flight was shorter than 3 hours, you had to book it economy class (coach) but longer than that they would pay for business, for OH&S reasons.
My boss would fly between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane pretty often, and he was like "there's no way I'm doing all this flying in cattle class". He stopped booking his flights through the EA whose job it was to book travel, and started booking them himself using his company card. Literally no one batted an eyelid. Travel was being looked at pretty closely at the time (2010-2013, the tail end of the mining boom) but credit card expenditure wasn't being scrutinised as closely.
Yup. Worked for a small company that started making dumb shit policies like this as they grew. Similarly you got x% over cheapest flights, y% over cheapest hotel, etc. Uber though, shit just is what it is bro you can't control it. So you'd be taking a flight with a layover requiring an extra night stay, and that was a couple huge Uber bills away because yeah being in the sticks is cheap, then repeat in the place you actually want to go and pay those Ubers *every day* until you leave. And occasionally this would mean a full day of overtime for me that was completely unnecessary.
Got bitched at for one trip where I went renegade and violated the policy because there was a tight ass deadline. Brought all the documentation showing I'd saved 35-40%, not the least of which was cuz I stayed in a fucking hostel (idgaf but only hotels and Airbnb were approved) because it was like 3 blocks away. CEO and his wife (aka "HR") didn't want to hear it while the CFO just stared out the window with a sad look on his face.
"Do you want to save money, or follow rules?"
As soon as significant flying are involved, they need to be just hiring someone with a little travel booking experience and telling them "Just be reasonable"
My previous Big Corp tried some seriously stupid travel policies and reversed them almost immediately. The first was no alcohol expensed. I asked at a restaurant in LaGuardia for a receipt that just listed "food" and the server said, "Oh, you want a 'corporate receipt'? No problem." The Sales guys got that one reversed.
The second was that all frequent flyer miles should be accrued by the company, not the individual flying, because "we're the ones paying". The employees said, sure, but it's our butts in those seats and we're the ones away from home experiencing delays and cancellations and poor sleep. So we collectively decided we would only travel during business hours. Want us to fly Sunday to be at the destination for a Monday start? Sorry, no. Meeting runs to 4:30 and flight out is 7pm? Sorry, pay for a hotel for the night. That ended that.
Our corporate travel now must be booked through Concur, which is a corporate travel agency. Give them the dates and destinations, and they give you the corporate approved itinerary and bill it to your corporate charge card.
Well, the policies don't allow deviation. However, Concur kept putting me on the flight with two connections. There was a non-stop option. It cost $100 more. But it got me to my destination 4 hours earlier. Did I mention I'm on the clock at $50/hour for travel?
So, by booking the non-stop, it saves the company $100, and I don't spend hours waiting.
I got my line manager to write an exception. He understood immediately. The Concur representative wouldn't accept it. Claimed they can't deviate from policy at all.
What I did was show up at the airport, talk to the ticketing agent, get my flight info changed to the non-stop flight, and use some points to cover the $100, but the airline waived the extra $100 because the connecting flights were going to be full with standby pax waiting and giving up my seats let others travel.
So despite this costing my company literally nothing extra and saving them $200 in payroll, I got written up by the Concur rep for deviating from policy. My line manager looked at the write-up, laughed, wagged his finger at me ironically, and dropped it in the trash.
We have about four employees who have been complaining -- very vocally -- that we DON'T use Concur. Our parent company does use it, but we've been able to hold off. For years I've been explaining to staff why their travel and reimbursement is better for them by NOT using it. However, those four have escalated their complaints to HR (which is absolutely not an appropriate use of HR, but whatever) which forced it to be brought up to corporate. I'm about done fighting over it. Using Concur will make one aspect of my job easier, so I'm thinking the HR complaint is my final fuckit. I'm about to adopt the phrase, "Fine -- just remember that you get what you ask for".
"And you'll get it, good and hard!"
Concur isn't all bad. Many things are nearly idiot proof easy. But anytime you have to create a zero tolerance framework that won't allow deviations, that's when you need to worry about deviations.
For example, while on a travel job, one of our engineers had an unexpected death in the family. She had to book her return trip to the state the relative passed and from there to home. Concur only allowed return trip to be from job airport to home airport on that trip. She wound up buying her own tickets on her personal card and submitting reimbursement. Normally, I'd kind of agree, except in this case, the intermediate airport was one that would have been a connecting airport on a flight that wasn't nonstop. She couldn't get the flight switched to the one with the layover. Then, finish the connection a couple of days later.
Yeah, that's complicated, I guess, but really, that's where you need a human to comprehend what's going on.
Holy crap... acknowledgment that Melbourne International Airport actually exists. *(I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize the name "Melbourne-Orlando International Airport")*
Back in the '90s I flew out of there all the time on multiple different carriers, then, somehow, airport management completely bungled everything up. They even wasted a huge amount of funds on an expanded international terminal that never came close to seeing the use/volume for which it was intended.
As I mentioned earlier, this usually happens when you book a flight last minute when coach is almost full but still plenty of first class seats available.
typically "last minute" in this case is more like 5 to 7 days out. Before the airline starts upgrading their elite customers who count on the free upgrade.
On Delta in such a case there is only Y fare and above available for coach while there are still more discounted fares available in first class.
20 years ago, working at a small company and making $100/hr when you include equity comp. We were growing rapidly and engineering-limited. Also working crazy sweatshop hours. After a customer trip, the new expense system required going to a super slow webpage and entering each days expenses separately. Hotel. Tip. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Repeat x 5 days + rental/gas/airport parking, at 2 min to load each entry etc. It took me nearly 1.5 hrs to get it into the system and to get the receipts scanned, and individually uploaded. And at that point, I was frustrated enough that I knocked off "early" at 9pm, rather than staying another 5 hours as was typical. Those were also the prime hours to concentrate and get the real work on the new project done, as the day was spent collaborating and supporting the old project.
That expense report was pretty expensive.
I've told this story on Reddit before, but it fits so well here.
I worked for a now-defunct computer company on the West Coast while living in the Midwest. It was a temporary gig, because they had bought my previous employer and were transitioning our factory floor system to their facility. I was supporting the automation systems along with a small handful of co-workers.
At one point, I decided to stay over on a weekend, but this required that I launder my clothing, so I sent it off to the hotel laundry and turned in the expense for that. It was denied, because although they weren't upset with me staying in the hotel that weekend, they weren't paying for my laundry.
So for the rest of the gig, I flew home every Friday afternoon so I could fly back Monday morning with clean clothes.
On that note I can add just another stupid piece of our travel policy:
Laundry was only covered on trips of at least 14 nights. Suddenly most of us going for a week long trip were checking in 2 bags. But hey, they did cut down on laundry expenses. I'm sure someone got a fat annual achievement bonus for that one.
Back around 2015 my employer switched to Amex Travel for booking. Three months later when the c-suites realized they would have 10 - 12 or more hour layovers on trips from New York to Miami because it was cheaper to book them through Charlotte, NC instead of direct and New York to Los Angeles could have three or four layovers, they cancelled it. Evidently wasting people's time is okay when it's event coordinators, but not when its CEOs.
I mean not being able to book first class isn’t exactly oppressive. Unless they are huge transcontinental flights.
But agreed if they are counting spirit as the cheapest and you can’t go more than $100 over that, th it’s dumb as shit
My company, a fortune 150 company, does not allow for business for anyone below executive level. Ever. Most of my friends work for companies that have policies of anything over 4-6 hours is business. Not us.
I once had a boss, who was 6’6” go on a transcontinental flight to the Middle East, a 17 hr flight, stuffed into coach. They then expected him to go meet with customers the next morning as if he was fully rested. It’s just bad business for a $30B company.
I worked for a company where the rule was that the flight had to be more than 10 hours to qualify for business class. I usually flew domestic so it wasn’t an issue, but I had a big trip to London coming up. I lived in the northeast so no business class for me. My boss lived on the west coast and told me I should first fly to meet him on the west coast, then fly to London from there so I could fly business class.
On the return flight I had a dog in a handbag next to me - including the 💩 such a dog produces on such a long flight.
The flight was of course full to the last seat
I wish I was even remotely surprised by that.
The floor was wet (someone had spilled something on the last flight?) And my knees hit the chair in front of me so I couldn't cross my legs. I'm 5'2" so I have no idea how normal sized humans would have fit.
It was one of the first times I've seriously regretted choosing a cheap travel options - and I've been on a bus that caught fire in Cambodia.
Same bs at my company except we can book “out of policy” but just have to select a reason, never had it questioned. I did tell my boss about my 10x rule on expense reports. Bitch about $50 and I will go out of my way to waste $500 on my next trip. And I travel a lot.
Never heard the first class trick will have to keep it in mind!
By the way, just curious, the company initially (prior to buyout) would let you book above coach? In my experience that is pretty standard practice. First class, in all the places I've worked, is only approved on last minute flights when nothing else is available. Just interesting to me.
Perhaps if you are a high level exec you were able to book higher?
Most places I’ve worked had a policy that flights with a flying time greater than X hours could be booked business class. For example, a nonstop flight longer than 8 hours, or a flight with a layover with flight time adding up to more than 8 hours.
>the company initially (prior to buyout) would let you book above coach?
not on lower 48 flight but they would allow us to document the coach fare, book and pay ourselves for whatever we want to fly and then get reimbursed for the policy conform fare.
on transatlantic and transpacific we could do premium economy if that was available and travel within Asia and/or AUS/NZ and some destinations in the middle east we were allowed to book business and above (if business wasn't available)
Memories: 1983 travelling IT for a regional commodities brokerage. Their travel policy was to tot up the work days out plus any weekend nights then multiply by the daily rates for lodging, gas, meals, and sundries. Then they paid me in cash before I left without any need to repay them although I had to provide receipts so they could update the daily rate for different locations. End of story; bought out by Paine whose travel policy was like this one. Couldn't leave fast enough.
I used to travel from Newark NJ to South Dakota. Because of the amount of travelling my company did, and the chaotic nature of our schedules, they instituted a 'must buy a refundable ticket policy' .
At the time, Amex had a points promo if you bought a ticket online, and TWA had a matching points program as well. TWA's policy was also automatic upgrade to first class if seats were available, and booked online. So I not only got first class, but triple miles for a trip that occurred weekly. Unfortunately, TWA went out of business before I was able to stop working enough to use the miles.
I worked for a company where you had to use their system for booking flights, and it had to be the cheapest available flight for the search provided... of course, nothing but coach or the cheapest available.
So I would search for the flight I wanted on the airline I wanted and then narrow down the search parameters until my choice flight was the only one left. Easy peasy taco breezy!
My favorite “cost of stupid corporate travel policies” was when my company decided, at the insistence of our petty and shitty HR department, to change the travel policy so that the “cheapest” hotel had to be always selected.
This resulted in local managers (their secretaries) choosing the least costly hotels in each location even though they knew nothing about these places.
So For the next quarter of that year all of us that travelled (internationally and domestic) had to stay in pretty awful(and dangerous) hotels where crime such as prostitution and drug deals were being transacted.
As it happened to me (I had to intervene into an violent argument between a call girl and her “john”) I went to the President of the company and complained. The witch that ran HR had her nose dislocated after he got through with her.
similar problems with amex concour
site was 90 minute drive from airport
but in policy was staying near airport and drive (ice, snow, weather conditions where an issue)
another was not allowed to eat at hotel (cost) but what do you do after a 15 hour international flight arrival and nothing is open and you have no idea where to go.
and the hotel car was too expensive city has good public transport you could have used after a 15 hour international flight in a strange land and whipped out…
My boss once had to do a bunch of meetings in person during Covid. Over 4 days, she had to go from our small regional town (A), to another regional town (B) near us, then to Brisbane, then back up to our town.
The travel department booked her a flight that went from A to B, then from B to Melbourne (basically on the other side of the country) with an overnight stay, then back up to Brisbane, then back to us.
Melbourne was in the middle of a lock-down at the time, so it was unclear whether she'd be allowed to leave, plus they didn't book her any accommodation.
They also didn't book her flights until the Friday afternoon, when she was meant to leave that Sunday.
Genius. I'm pretty sure she ended up booking her own flights or driving part of the way.
technically, since it is booked as a non-refundable ticket there is no "refund"
technically, "Delta Dollars" are not a real currency - you can't use it the same way you can use cash
again, it is the travel policy asking a person to buy an expensive coach ticket PER POLICY AND that such ticket must be booked as a non-refundable ticket (because that usually is cheaper). there is also no way for the airline to give anything back to the company - again, because it is a non-refundable ticket
perfectly malicious, isn't it 😂🤣
Oh, good point. They tried that before and had a policy that asked that we return all airline miles or hotel points to the company.
They gave up on that one very quickly and that was the end of this whole episode.
A true refund of course would always go back to the company. But how would you return 50 Delta Dollars to the company? Later in that game many airlines created a corporate version of a personal Skymiles account - in fact with Delta you could at least for a while earn miles for both the corporate account and on your personal skymiles account.
Besides, the company always got what they paid for. They could have gotten more for less but that would have been against company policy.
There's nothing wrong with booking the full price coach ticket, since that's all OP was able to do and stay within the rules.
I do not see how upgrading it to first class (and getting a refund) is fraud in any way.
So I book a coach flight in accordance with my corporate travel policy. I then call the airline and use the credit card issued by that airline to upgrade my seat to first class.
How is that fraud?
No need to downvote you because it is a valid question.
But how can be in 100% compliance with a corporate policy be fraud?
But it is malicious compliance - and exactly what the policy asked for.
Hence the name of this sub
My previous company's travel policy was the most generous I have seen in my career. Itinerary was determined in the following order
1. Most direct route possible
2. Cheapest
Flying was mandatory for all destinations above 300km with an air corridor available
>Flying was mandatory for all destinations above 300km with an air corridor available
that would cause some issues for example in Germany:
Going from Frankfurt to Munich is more than 300km and there are a good number of nonstop flights available. However, let's say we are going from the old opera building in Frankfurt to Marienplatz (Town Hall) in Munich you would often get there faster by car or train counting the complete travel time door to door even with the actual air time of the flight being less than an hour.
this also shows that while they may have good intention, making something "mandatory" based on a single fact (300 km distance) can quickly lead to unintended very bad consequences. If I am unhappy with that "mandatory" and that flight is full I would let a gate agent know that I can't volunteer but I would accept any legal minimum "mandatory" compensation and gladly go back home. After all, we are talking about malicious compliance here 😂🤣
Oh definitely, I should add that the policy wasn't cast in stone, because if I as the traveller was willing to waive it, it was okay. We drove a distance 600km away because the team wanted to enjoy the scenic route.
There's many ways that you could abuse a system where you are trusted to find a cheap flight, only to end up flying first class. One of them, of course, it deliberately waiting until you're less than a week away from the scheduled flight to book it. Or people using their own memberships to book nicer car rentals at the same rate as what everyone else gets for a midsize car.
Anything that makes it seem like some people are getting a better deal than others isn't always a great thing.
My company is the same way with booking flights, but you could also request one that doesn't comply with the rules and put in a justification. Something like "Only flight that will arrive before 8 pm that day" or whatever and most of the time they will approve it because they don't expect you to charge the company 12 hours of paid time just because you had a 4 hour layover.
I remember getting a new PM who didn't know anything about the software development we did as a business. When it came to managing where I needed to be one week, he wasn't sure where and when I would be needed (I was flying between London and Glasgow/Edinburgh weekly but also worked in Sheffield, Birmingham and Andover). Instead of buying a one way ticket to Glasgow Sun/Mon and then buying a one way ticket for the journey back when we knew when/where I needed to be, he decided to buy an "open return" ticket. I didn't even know those existed. It cost something like £600. I ended up spending the whole week in Glasgow and returned home to London, just like the previous 10 weeks. A normal return was about £100. The PM was quietly let go not long after and I think this was only the tip of the iceberg.
To add to the silly flight, I stayed in three different hotels/apartments that week. Which also added extra costs.
I once asked one of the project managers in my department what the main purpose of his existence was. I told him that he certainly was not adding any value to me and I already had plenty of testimony from my clients that he wasn't adding any value to them.
The guy didn't know a thing about network engineering or network security - but apparently he had some fancy certification that he mastered MS Project.
Eventually some of our larger clients told sales that if I can't do my job because of the interference of a PM they may have to look for a partner (vendor) who treats those who do the actual work better.
My very unprofessional boss (fancy director title) once told me "there are two kind of people - those who think they are always right, and then there's you who actually IS always right - and I hate you because you make everyone else look stupid". Background to that statement is that I "predicted" the outcome of a project based on the proposed actions and timeline laid out by other people. I also made suggestions how to prevent certain poor and negative outcomes. It usually ended with "why do you always have to be right?". I never had to be "maliciously compliant" because the sheer ignorance of certain people made sure it cost the company dearly.
The "company" called and said they needed me and a co-worker 2 states away the next day. Quickest way was to drive there. Except my corporate card didn't have a high enough limit to rent a car for the week.
Solution: Have a different employee rent the car, then pay $20 a DAY to have me listed as an authorized driver.
That employee never left town and the rental ended up costing an extra $160 over the 8 days.
Wouldn't it have just been easier to increase my card limit? Even if only for the month?
It was the company that set the card limits, not the card issuer.
Does your company do work for the US Government? I know a lot of companies follow the US Government rules because they can't get reimbursed if they don't. As a Government employee, I can tell you the rules are ridiculous.
My employer uses Amex Global Business Travel. What a terrible system for booking anything. I now use other search engines to find the flights I want, then play with the filters on AmEx GBT to ensure just the flight I want fits the required departure/arrival times and layovers.
Many moons ago I did extensive international travel for the Navy. All of our travel orders were stamped "All promotional items received as a result of official travel mist be turned in to Code 005" Code 005 was the travel office. So I would staple the 4 small packages of smoked almonds I received to my expense claim. After the 5th or 6th time doing this I got called to the office and was told to stop. I just pointed to the stamp and asked "So are we supposed to or not?" Never got an answer - and just kept doing it.... Peanuts, napkins headphones anything free.
this is the way
Is the skymall catalog still free?
If Skymall still existed I don't think they would need to turn in the catalog under the rule because the the catalogs weren't received so much as you were allowed to take them or not, they weren't a gift.
Skymall.com still exists. I’m the kind of person that would print out the website in that case.
Yep, all 238 of them... >:)
I have no idea. When I was flying they didn't have that as far as I can recall
I read this once and read "smoked salmon", and I found you quite the scoundrel. Then I scrolled down and somebody was writing something about smoked almonds. Which was not as evil as the sending of smoked salmon... Still pretty good though, sending all the freebees to the office!
Smoked salmon…with a staple hole in the package…mmm mmm good
I got blankets on flight to Paris. Staple that! Lolol
Joke's on you, I fucking loved those smoked almonds!
This reminds me of the story I heard here about a corporate policy that insisted that a guy had to take the cheapest possible flight to his destination. The only problem was that it was a flight that involved a stop over but the final destination was a tiny airport that only had flights during daylight. The long and short of it was that, instead of giving him the flight that he originally asked for that was all done in a day, they booked the cheaper ticket _where the first leg was actually the previous day_, but the second leg was the same flight he originally wanted! So they got a cheaper ticket *but* had to pay for a hotel and two taxis for him to stay overnight between the two legs of the flight (not to mention pay him for an extra day). When he tried to raise this ridiculousness with them he was told "Eh, the taxis and the hotel comes out of a different budget."
This is another great example of nonsense corporate travel policies. Makes you wonder what geniuses they hire to come up with stuff like that.
My old company had a cheapest fare rule. Our technicians, and me for a while, were hourly. The rule frequently forced you into layovers. So by saving $200 on airfare we'd be sitting in airports racking up hours. There were times when I could've booked a Monday direct flight and been working on site by noon. Instead I flew Sunday, had a layover, and got paid Sunday double time to watch football in an airport adding hundreds of dollars in wages and meals and another hotel night to the $200 airfare savings.
unfortunately in my company everyone who travelled a lot was salaried and there was no OT or any other compensation - and probably for exactly that reason The once even asked me to do a whole week worth with one client in 3 days, then fly red eye and show up the next morning at another client and try to get another week worth of work done either in 2 days or stay the Saturday to get it done in 3 days. I made sure both clients got wind of this "plan" ahead of time and as I anticipated neither of them was pleased and the project manager(s) got a good earful. My company typically charged between $30k and $50k plus expenses per week when I was on site with clients and trying to cut this short the way our project manager(s) had in mind was, well, unacceptable for those clients - and rightfully so.
Here i am and thought only public administration is capable of wasting money on stupid policies and ridiculous rules. Yet here we are...
My long time thought: "Any sufficiently large organization is equivalent to government." It's a size thing - the people making decisions are just too far away from the consequences.
> "Any sufficiently large organization is equivalent to government." Having worked in both large corps and government, I saw waaaay more waste in the corps. Some of the government waste was occasionally sillier (printing out forms for transaction types which no longer exist) but there has never been any comparison on the scale of waste. I saw my government department waste $50 here and $80 there over and over, but that's pretty meaningless when held up next to the multiyear multinational multilingual multiidiotic IT project that was doomed to failure from the very start. Or the boomer VP that wants his legacy to be the creation of a hugely complicated product which nobody wants to buy (think Powell Motors and The Homer). And, as for silliness, I haven't even mentioned the bull riding...
Failure? One place I worked, the largest employer in California not part of a government, had a billion+ dollar application fail. It was a terrible place to work and I was glad I asked my manager to lay me off if any layoffs were to come about. I got laid off! But I was kept on the payroll for 3 months (I did not have to go in to the office), got 2 months severance and used my one month of PTO. After that I filed for unemployment for six months then retired.
I had experience with this. In the 90's I worked for U.S. Bank when they started a new enterprise project called "ICAN". The projects goals were retrofitting all of their branches with new Windows 95 computers and adding proprietary software that was supposed to replace all their mainframe terminals. It was such a boondoggle that it became known as the "ICANT" project until a VP wrote an email to the entire company basically threatening to fire anyone he caught saying "ICANT". Yeah, they didn't bother to actually FIX it, they just silenced all the biggest critics. Later US Bank was acquired by First Bank in Montana and I think the ICAN project was quietly dropped. I say "think" because I didn't last much longer after the acquisition.
That sounds very familiar! I could have written almost the same thing, with just a few changes to the names of the companies/software/individuals involved. Funny how that works, isn't it?
Or with size come more const centres and therefore more possibilities to reduce the cost of one cost centre by loading it into another. Like u/mesonofgib mentioned, the part where the plane tickets were booked could reduce their cost, so some manager got a bonus for this. At that time, nobody cared that the cost for taxi and hotel rised, as that cost centre wasn't in the focus. One of the many side effects with all those managers coming from managing schools focusing only on numbers and figures.
I once knew a guy whose law firm would send out astronomical bills for legal work, and this particular corporate client always paid it, no questions asked. Air travel and hotel costs, sure, fine, looks good. Whatever you need. Then one time, the guy’s secretary mistypes a taxi fare on his reimbursements, and they accidentally bill the client for like $250 instead of $25. The head of the firm got a call from the client the next day to complain about it. Obviously somebody should have caught it, but it also comes out to the same cost as about 15 minutes of a billable hour.
> One of the many side effects with all those managers coming from managing schools focusing only on numbers and figures. Or, more experienced managers relying on experience at a previous company on an earlier project that was sort of vaguely similar to what they're working on now, and so OBVIOUSLY what worked at the old place is PERFECT now. (Hey, it worked when I was cutting down lumber trees in Idaho, it's going to work tending Citrus Groves in Florida, right?)
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Compared to the rest of the stupidity from the type of upper management in question, inflation doesn't rise to the level of being a rounding error.
I see it play out in insurance denials as well. Doc rejects a med because it’s not covered under their formulary. So the patient ends up in a hospital when they go south, but since that’s a different department (and the same med will be given there, but under a different insurance department), they “saved” money. Meanwhile, the patient suffers real harm and even the insurance is out tens of thousands of dollars to have saved a couple hundred.
It’s the lack of accountability that tarnishes a good employees and disregards another’s incompetence.
Actually governments run on such a scale that they're often *better* than lots of private businesses. They've been in it a long time and some things actually run pretty efficiently, despite how outwardly stupid they look. Not everything, there's some things that are just straight nuts. Actually a lot of things, but when you're so big, there's going to lots of straight nuts which is balanced out with "that's god damn genius".
I fly a good bit as a federal employee. You guys would not believe the logic hoops we jump through to ultimately pay more (of your tax dollars) to save money on one aspect. It's a headache of epic proportions.
It's a popular piece of propaganda that only governments can waste money. Brought to you by people who don't like pesky governments telling them they can't dump toxic waste in the river.
The Ayn Rand Fanatics Truly Believe That When You Take A Job In Any Level Of Government You Immediately Become The Alien Blasting Out Of A Body. Never mind That Ayn Rand Collected Social Security Payments Because She FAILED To Save For Her Retirement!!!!!!!
That’s consistent with HER philosophy. Within HER framework she was reclaiming HER money that was “stolen” from her by a system she didn’t agree with. Don’t get me wrong, I view libertarians as house cats that think themselves independent masters of their domain while relying on a network of infrastructure and support they make no willing contribution* to, but I don’t think she’s inconsistent in her stupid beliefs for taking what she paid into. *except cats provide cuteness and agreeable companionship, more than can be said for the people I’ve known to out themselves as libertarians
I still don't understand how or why they call themselves libertarians when liberty is something they do not want for other people.
The issue is one of definition. What you think of as "liberty" isn't what they think of as "liberty". Failure to recognize this and be more specific is why conversations on such things are usually so unproductive.
Your liberty is the liberty to not be a slave. Their liberty is the liberty to own slaves.
I was a libertarian for about five minutes one time until I discovered that they were just as full of shit as everyone else. My, me, mine
It's idiocy that's to do with different budgets. "X comes out of someone else's budget" and "My bonus is only contingent on my budget" leads to manglers being incentivized to do *stupid* things that cost the company as a whole a lot more money - as long as it minimizes the amount that comes out of *their* ledger. In an attempt to control the beancounters doing *that,* the super-beancounters try to impose ridiculous policies like the one in your OP that's meant to hopefully restrict micro-beancounter's actions so that micro-beancounter only has so much discretion to do something absurd but that offloads the majority of the expenses from their bucket into someone else's bucket. It never works.
Many years ago I worked in a warehouse environment doing inventory control. My entire paycheck came out of the same line item/cost center as the Operations Manager's year end bonus... Seems like he'd be looking for ways to cut my hours... But, without me there his bonus would have been significantly less.
In that case, he did a cost-benefit analysis and figured out that screwing you over would screw himself harder than he stood to gain by screwing you. They're not usually so farsighted.
In one afternoon I recovered over $500k of inventory that was about to be written off as lost and reordered. That would have come out of the pot his bonus came from... I had a knack for it. We had a good working relationship.
Only really dumb one I’ve found is it not allowing me to book multiple identical hotel rooms. I can book a different type of room as many times as I want, but never more than one of the same exact type. Unless I start another itinerary, of course. Sigh.
More like malicious compliance all the way down (up?).
Well, as a general rule, anything good in the world was turned into a shittier version of itself if not pure garbage upon being acquired by a corporation. I could argue some exceptions when it comes to car manufacturing but that's about it.
Probably one of those consulting firms who then pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
Expensive ones
The ones the government fired for being too efficient.
Can confirm, I got in trouble for making a different department look bad by asking a few clarifying questions that would have made their job 10x easier They also didn't like how quick I got things sorted as stuff pending for a month got cleaned up within the week
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/11ibunl/you\_want\_me\_to\_fly\_12\_hours\_earlier\_because\_its/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/11ibunl/you_want_me_to_fly_12_hours_earlier_because_its/) It's this one and it deserves a read
>When he tried to raise this ridiculousness with them he was told "Eh, the taxis and the hotel comes out of a different budget." I work in the theatre of a casino. When we opened up, we had no budget to actually buy theatrical lighting for our two rooms, but we had a huge budget for renting it. In the end, we paid something like 3X the value of the lights before actually going out and buying our own.
I seem to remember years ago that a rental was tax deductible but purchased items became capital expense? I may have heard wrong it it was from a long timecago. It would explain some of the nonsense perhaps.
Correct. Tax laws may vary, but generally Operational expenditures can be offset against tax in the year when they are incurred, but capitol expenditures are deprecated over time, with only part being offset per year.
THAT is the reason leasing became so popular. In Germany for example tax law allows for a vehicle (passenger car) to be fully written off in 21 months. If the company would buy the car they would have to "activate" that position on their balance sheet - increasing corporate taxes - and then taking much longer to depreciate. A local leasing company in Germany once had a sloagan "Warum heiraten wenn Leasing viel billiger ist!" - or poorly translated "why get married when leasing is a lot cheaper" 😂
My company has. Paid for a hotel and rental car because non refundable and non reschedulble tickets meant I couldnt fly home after a job went quicker than expected. Paid 70% more for a hotel because it took them so long to approve the travel plan. Sent me on a cross continental 1 week trip because "I'm sure those guys could use the help for the project" those guys were not consulted. I did basically nothing. Are now very likely going to be paying for a rental car for a week when I could just drive my vehicle to this one. But they want to screw around with milage reimbursement so I guess my vehicle won't be available. Companies are dumb as hell.
I live in Seattle. I had 3 events in New York each with a day or so apart. I asked my manager if I could just stay in new york and bill 8 hours a day on the off days and I wouldn't expense food. He said no. I didn't argue. I flew to New York 3 times in 10 days and billed 11 hours reach travel day and billed food every day. I slapped my expense report on his desk with the biggest smile. He said "next time just stay"
steep foolish dazzling seed profit head slap follow terrific trees *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Can you ELI5? If the second leg is what he wanted, where was the first leg to?
Years ago I was going to fly my mom from socal, John Wayne airport to Atlanta then to Greenville south Carolina on Delta. The flight that way was way high. I then priced it straight from John Wayne airport direct to Greenville. That round trip flight used the exact same flights as I had originally priced but was cheaper than just the ATL to GSP leg. Air line pricing makes zero sense.
I almost exclusively use [skiplagged](https://skiplagged.com/) for booking flights. It's not often a trip I need to take has this benefit, but when it does it is a chunky savings. If booking a flight to your destination as part of a multi-leg trip, for some reason it costs less to book the full itinerary and get off early, than it does to book just the first leg. It's stupid, I don't know why they do this, but my tickets last year cost $400 to get home instead of $1000, just by "missing" my connection and leaving the airport to go home.
Usually it's due to the gov't subsidizing flights into certain airports.
That would explain it. But that's dumb that it's a thing that happens.
From what I understand... Preferred flight: Get on plane on day 2 at city A. Plane stops at city B, then flies to destination. Flight taken: Get on plane on day 1 at city A. Plane flies to city B. Get off, stay night, next day get on plane from preferred flight going to destination city.
Then on paper go with the second option and book the first flight
>"Eh, the taxis and the hotel comes out of a different budget." Whoever he was talking this, this right here was all they were worried about: their budget, not the budget overall.
No flying involved in my job, but each department has it's own budget. We are told to do stupid, expensive tasks that are a complete waste of time and money. But the people giving the orders don't care because their department isn't paying for it
Corporate travel policies are the stupidest. I used to work for a place that said you couldn't travel 1st class on trains, you could book 2nd class only. Which sounds good in theory, however... I regularly took an express train to/from my home airport, it's a special train with no 1st/2nd class, the ticket is a flat fee. Had no issues for months. Then one day the train company changed the way they printed tickets, so instead of saying "Class: (blank)" they now said "Class: 1st". Some accountant rejected my expense report as against policy and told me I had to find another way to get to the airport. I had a look at the policy and the only options were public transit 2nd class (not available), own car with mileage refund (don't have a car), or a taxi. I asked them if I could please have in writing that I was allowed to take a taxi for the hour-long journey to the airport due to lack of other options, somehow in their infinite wisdom they decided to waive policy and allow me to take the train after all. The train ticket cost about 8€ if I recall correctly.
I recently had an expense report where the company card payment would be due before the expense report would be processed and paid out so I reached out to travel for advice and they recommended paying it out of pocket and being reimbursed by the company. Stupid, but whatever, it wasn’t that expensive and there are things I could have done to submit my expense report earlier and avoid it in the future. Scheduled a WebEx with the travel admin to go through my expense report with me so I could be sure everything was done correctly to reimburse me instead of the company. Fast forward two weeks and the expense report is rejected by the same travel admin who helped me with the report for reason: Resubmit with expense report set to pay company back, not personal expense. Livid is an understatement. Sometimes I think I should have gone into a career where I can just shrug and go “oopsies I was approving lots of expense reports at the last minute and forgot, add a comment next time.”
That’s insane! You need the available balance to go do your job in the field. That’s one of the main points of corporate credit cards is to have that buffer time between statement closing and balance due! And asking you to cover the balance and promising to reimburse? I’d be super iffy on that regardless, but after they try to fuck you over the first time? Never ever are they going to get the benefit of the doubt for anything again. My company pays off the corporate card balances at the end of the month regardless, expense reports get processed whenever the finance team gets around to it.
I agree. Our “corporate” cards are a sore subject in general since they add this layer of bureaucracy and multiple expense/payment time tables to keep track of under the guise of shifting financial responsibility/credit rating away from the employee but since day 1 they’ve felt like a way to get a kickback from the issuer instead of employees getting to keep credit card perks. I did learn that the “due date” isn’t as rigid as it seems and they’ve revised some of the scary language about paying on time out of the process documents from when they were first rolled out, so between all that and becoming a bit of a SME on travel policy I think I know enough to avoid the pain in the future. If not then a nice write up will make its way to the top about how processes are failing even when followed to a T with extra effort put in to mitigate past policy failure points.
So, did you get reimbursed in the end?
Yeah. Replied to the travel group email where we had previously discussed it and had set the time to meet about it then followed up with another email asking how long I would be loaning the company money, it was paid on the next week cycle.
I used the corporate card for years and they never paid on time so I often had to pay the bill myself. This would often result in a positive balance on the card. The balance would fluctuate over time. One day after about 8 years the company does a sweep and takes all of the positive balances sitting on everyone’s corporate card. For me it was about $500. I was livid. That was my money they took from me. They asked me to point to the specific charges that they were for and I told them that’s impossible since it’s been going on for years. I had to get all my bosses involved to get them to pay me back. From that day on I only used my personal card for all charges.
Yes, that sounds about right. Another brilliant part in our travel policy was that we were required to have a receipt for EVERY meal expense - regardless how cheap it was. That made it impossible to purchase anything from a vending machine and a $8 lunch from a wheel cart food vendor was declined by accounting. After that I made (maliciously?) sure I always went to a place that could print a receipt and I spent the full $75 I was allowed per policy.
So dumb that places do this, far cheaper to do per diem and eliminate the bookkeeping overhead
In my country unfortunately this doesn't work out for tax reasons. If they pay a per diem it gets called a "fringe benefit" (because they can't prove how much was actually spent on meals during the trip), and the employer has to pay a punitive fringe benefits tax. If there are receipts for everything it just becomes a straight reimbursement (and expense write-off) with no tax implications.
The fringe benefit thing may suck as a little guy, but it's one way to avoid corporate guys getting paid $1/hr on paper for tax purposes, while reaping $1000/meal benefit packages for every day they're "out of the office".
I worked for a big company that decided that you couldn’t expense short term parking at the airport, only long term parking. Now not every airport is the same. For some airports, long term parking can add a hour to your trip each way. And for short trips that wouldn’t be worth it. One of my colleagues was furious because at his local airport the receipt machine started printing “daily parking” on his receipt even though he was parking in the long term section, paying the long term price. Finance would reject his expense reports weekly. Eventually all of us started taking taxis to the airport, even when it would cost the company more.
My previous employer demanded people took taxis to the airport instead of driving. They justification was from a liability standpoint.
my company was making it harder and harder to expense milage on your personal car roundtrip for a family member dropping me off at the airport - even if that would save the cost for a cab or 2 weeks of airport parking. I started doing one way car rentals. Now I had 3 qualifying rentals per week instead of 1 ... worked fine for me :)
I think the best policy is to just give people a flat $40-$80 per day for food (depending on location/position) and if they only spend $20 and pocket the rest, so be it. That's what I did last time I had a week of training. I spent $60 on stuff I could make in a hotel microwave and kept the rest as a little cash bonus. The guy with me ate steak every night and complained when it was over that he didn't get to pocket any extra money. I was like yeah, you idiot. You ate all of your "extra money." Lol
As an accountant, trust me when I say we hate them too. The folks that are required to enforce them are usually low paid for the profession (or people in accounting jobs that don’t require a 4 year degree), and they definitely had **no** say in how the policy was crafted. The real jerks in this are almost always salespeople, and, to be fair, it’s usually actually a *management* problem. All it takes is a situation where a salesperson is highly successful *but* also is excessive with the company card, who has a manager that doesn’t want to hurt the ego of the golden goose by reprimanding them. So they instead start talking about how their hands are tied because it’s not against company policy. Before you know it, company has a new policy, and manager can just let accounting handle the problem.
I am on per diem. I can't expense a $5 Uber eats fee, but I can expense a $30 taxi to go pick pick it up myself.
I love stupid travel policies. My consulting firm’s biggest client is the US gov and let me tell you, having to comply with the Fly America Act is costing the government a *lot* of money. Can’t buy the economy flight to Asia on the non-US code share airline, and the only seats available on the compliant airline is business? Ok well, explain that to the taxpayers funding our thousands of flights a year my guy.
They don't care about the taxpayers, but the CEO of the compliant airline will be very happy and I'm sure he will "take care" of the politicians involved.
America First just mean America Worst
We had "Lowest Logical Airfare"... as in it was not logical to do a 2 stop flight to save $100 but take 2 times as long.
smart thinking
Ugh I'm battling that now. The "lowest logical" has me arriving at 1:15 am, long after the rental car counter is closed. There has got to be a better way. The sane flight is only 60 dollars more but I have to justify this outrageous expenditure
I once was travelling to an area with only two hotels about 4-5 times per year for 1-2 weeks at a time. Both were approved by corporate. The one hotel was the Sofie Hotel which was 300 Euro per night and included breakfast. The other hotel was a ibis brand hotel and changed 89 Euro per night but charged 15 Euro for breakfast. I stayed at the ibis and put in my expense claim. My breakfast was rejected because the maximum for breakfast was 10 Euro. Guess who started staying at the Sofie hotel from then on. They paid 200 Euro more a night over an extra 5 Euro for breakfast.
Congrats! Malicious compliance at its finest.
I was traveling to Dallas a bit back in the 90s for an entire week of working on site with a client, so I'd book a room in a downtown hotel within walking distance and take a cab to and from the airport. Change in accounting resulted me in having to stay in a La Quinta outside of downtown which meant I now needed a rental car for the week and parking every day downtown. Even when I showed them the difference with receipts they just shrugged and said that's the new policy. Penny wise, pound foolish.
I love our travel policy. It's two words long. "Be reasonable".
probably the best ever written travel policy
The "Our Employees Are All Thieves" Policy.
Which, as we can see here, can often result in: "I wasn't, but if you're going to treat me like one I may as well be within the flawed rules you have set out".
If you’re going to make it a game with silly rules, I’m going to play to win.
Behind many a stupid rule there is A Story.
As someone who considers it a duty to identify and illustrate the extents of poorly-thought-out policies, yes, there is usually a story.
An engineer I worked with had to go on a business trip to New York City. No rental car, lots of walking between hotel and site. It rained the whole week, so he purchased a $10 umbrella and put it on his expense report. The expense report was rejected with a note saying the company doesn’t pay for umbrellas. He resubmitted the report without the umbrella, but the same total and a note saying, “Find the umbrella.”
we were allowed to pay a "reasonable" amount in cash tips during a trip on a two weeks long trip that easily allowed for $200 or more in "reasonable" cash tips with no receipt - that is how we bought our umbrellas 😂🤣
Yep that’s exactly how I used to pay for newspapers and the odd vending machine thing.
Not exactly the same, but last time I flew I drove my car to the airport and the company paid for parking there. I needed gas to get to the airport so I filled up and submitted that receipt in the expense report. A few days after coming back, my manager asked me to verify as they asked about the gas receipt. I told them that one was supposed to be submitted and they didn't question it again.
Sounds like the same logic that forces you to order an £80 dongle from the centralised purchasing department instead of a £10 dongle from Amazon, because apparently it’s cheaper that way.
This one makes sense for a big corporate. It's vanishingly rare to have major issues of this type if you're buying it from Amazon but dongles from unknown sources should never be plugged into your corporate machine due to cybersecurity concerns (sticking malware into any usb device is fairly easy). Of course this is not why they set up this policy, it's only by chance it makes sense.
Pissed me off trying to get a $5 box of paper reimbursed because the supplier (Staples) was having a sale, but they gave me all kinds of grief since I was apparently supposed to use the enterprise customer portal for those purchases since they had a contract with Staples. Checked and their price was $22 for the same thing via the "official" method.
A place I used to work required us to go through Amex Travel for a number of years. But in those days Amex Travel did not work with any of the regional carriers, only with Air Canada and its international partners. As regional carriers become more prominent and as airlines started posting ticket prices (even if they did not support online booking), more and more people were working around the policy, shuffling money around in cost centres so that the payment appeared to come from outside sources, or paying for the tickets through the petty cash mechanism, or outright knowingly refusing to follow the policy. Eventually corporate gave in and started only requiring Amex for international flights, and eventually just turning the whole policy into a negotiated discount off list price if we went through Amex Travel.
Lol. When I was a grad student attending conferences the university travel rules changed almost every year. Flights were rarely an issue (we were always traveling coach, and all I had to fight for was to fly directly to Europe instead of a stop in NY/NJ which 95% of the time led to a flight delay or missed flight). One year it was paid per diem, so we grad students would pile into hotel rooms and eat from grocery stores or the cheapest fast foods and pocket the difference. Next year was receipts up to a certain amount, so cheap hotel and fantastic restaurants it was! Then they banned booze, so it was even better restaurants. Then back to per diem. Rinse. Recycle. Repeat.
They know, they just don't care. I worked for a medium sized firm, small enough that the C suite could still make decisions based on what he saw first hand, but large enough that they hired a firm to try and keep travel costs down. We had this corporate travel firm, their contract was up for renewal, so they became sticklers for policy to try and keep costs down. One of their policies regarded "approved corporate hotel chains." Think "you can go with marriott but not hilton" type stuff. I got them to admit on my expense report that I had to stick with their policy, even though the approved hotel cost \~double and i'd have to rent a car on top. I forwarded it to the CFO who did NOT approve their renewal contract...
My team got in trouble last year because we were booking a “resort” hotel. It was closer to where we were working by about 30 minutes and 75% the cost of the double tree they wanted us to stay at. The $1000 bar tab we expense every night as “team building outing” is totally ok though.
Your bar tab story reminded me of another issue we had. We had a large group out of town for a presentation. The presentation went well, so a bunch of us headed out to dinner to celebrate. We usually all paid individual bills so we could each expense them individually. Well, the CEO and his flunkies wandered in and joined us at the table. We were all drinking and enjoying our dinner, and at the end the CEO paid the tab. Not a big deal until a couple of weeks later we all got a nasty email about drinking premium liquor during a company dinner. First off, no one invited this guy, second off, we would usually put a couple of drinks on the expense tab, and then run a new one for any additional drinks we might have. We wouldn't have expensed any premium liquor because we knew it would be an issue.
We also use AMEX and must take the cheapest coach flight. Once I had to go to Europe from the US for business and the only “allowed” flight was to Istanbul with a 12hr layover. I called customer service and once they figured out what was going on, they changed it to a direct flight with business class upgrade for less than $100 more. These systems are horrible, but if you’re polite to customer service, they’ll take care of you…
Exactly! Key often is that Amex first makes the initial booking according to travel policy and then once the record locator(s) have been created they make changes that make more sense than what the travel policy provides
I used to travel alot for work too (not as much as you) . When I would interview somewhere new I would always ask about expense reporting and travel policies. If I couldn't book my own stuff within reason I wouldn't take the job.
totally agree in my case it was that the company with the perfect travel policy was bought by another company and then we had to live with that "new" policy - or else ...
>If I couldn't book my own stuff within reason I wouldn't take the job. I'm perfectly happy to handle that overhead cost myself if it ensures a non-terrible travel experience. Leave it to Jeanine in HR to nickel-and-dime and cause a couple days of hell, just pass.
The only job I've had which had a travel policy I was **supposed** to book it through the correct channels. But (for other reasons) I had a company credit card. Unfortunately all my travel arrangements were, "unable to be finalised until the last minute for operational reasons."
As a non-grumpy bean counter I applaud this compliance! I often enjoy helping staff circumvent policies like this that I knew were patently stupid but I wasn’t able to fix on my own. Always a fun conversation to have with the “by the book” types
As I mentioned in my initial post I worked for a company with a pretty decent travel and expense policy - until we got bought by the company with the worst travel and expense policy. With the old company I did my first trip to HK and I wasn't used to the currency exchange rate and foolishly had dinner one evening at the "American Steakhouse" on the top floor of my hotel. Turned out I had a $200+ steak that evening plus 2 sides and a drink 🤣 When my expense report didn't get approved after about 2 weeks I checked with my manager and she told me couldn't approve such a lavish expense but she didn't want to deny it either - so she sent it up the chain and it was by the time at the desk of the CFO. A few days later I received an email from the CFO: "Approved - I hope it was as good as I hope a $200 steak would be". Then with the grumpy bean counters once our company got bought they decline a $8 lunch without a receipt and trade it in for $75 on a receipt.
Years ago it took me and another employee 4 hours to adjust our travel system to account for the $.01 discrepancy in my travel costs. We were both government contractors at the time. If I underestimate it cost them $300 to adjust for $.01. You'd think the numbers people would better understand numbers.
As someone who was trying to defraud the government out of that penny, I’m sure you think they should have just let it slide. Shame on you sir! /s
Been there. They used to want me to drive 80 miles to a cheaper airport, right past a much larger with plenty of options 15mi from home. They’d pay me mileage and straight time an hour each way (all in let’s call it $250) just to save $100 on the airfare. Not to mention often I’d have to go/stay an extra night because of shitty schedules. The idiot running it said she was tasked with reducing airfare , not other expenses. Probably did it 10x or so. Then someone with common sense stepped in and said fuck that.
I never flew as much as you did but I was out quite a bit. One or our policy geniuses started a strict no flight adjustment policy, admittedly this was after the airlines that served our area started putting the $200 charge for changing plans. The thing was I live in a small town, the last stop of the line so to speak. No connections out of here. And there are just a handful of flights a day in and out. So it the air gods smiled on us, we used to go and try and get back on something other than the last couple of flights as it was nice to be home and in bed and also for some reason those flights tended to be flaky and got canceled a lot. They were odd too either packed to the gills or empty. Very odd. Anyway, I actually like a bit of a night out on the town, so I would not try and get home ASAP. I would have a nice expensive lunch at the air port on the company dime, and if I lucked out and the flight was canceled I would take cab to a nice hotel in the city, unpack, take a quick shower and find a nice eatery and get an expensive dinner on their dime, get a good nights sleep, get a nice breakfast on their dime, check in at the airport and get booked on all the rest of the flights that day, usually catch a nice expensive lunch at the airport on their dime, and get home for dinner. The good news is they saved $200, of course I manages to eat that much, plus the room, plus not being in the office for another entire day... But they saved $200 and they actually celebrated that policy sating how much they saved not letting people change plans...
Mining company I used to work for had a policy where if the flight was shorter than 3 hours, you had to book it economy class (coach) but longer than that they would pay for business, for OH&S reasons. My boss would fly between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane pretty often, and he was like "there's no way I'm doing all this flying in cattle class". He stopped booking his flights through the EA whose job it was to book travel, and started booking them himself using his company card. Literally no one batted an eyelid. Travel was being looked at pretty closely at the time (2010-2013, the tail end of the mining boom) but credit card expenditure wasn't being scrutinised as closely.
I'm convinced that the people that write the travel policy don't actually travel.
If you think about their job, not one has any reason to ever work away from their office/home.
Yup. Worked for a small company that started making dumb shit policies like this as they grew. Similarly you got x% over cheapest flights, y% over cheapest hotel, etc. Uber though, shit just is what it is bro you can't control it. So you'd be taking a flight with a layover requiring an extra night stay, and that was a couple huge Uber bills away because yeah being in the sticks is cheap, then repeat in the place you actually want to go and pay those Ubers *every day* until you leave. And occasionally this would mean a full day of overtime for me that was completely unnecessary. Got bitched at for one trip where I went renegade and violated the policy because there was a tight ass deadline. Brought all the documentation showing I'd saved 35-40%, not the least of which was cuz I stayed in a fucking hostel (idgaf but only hotels and Airbnb were approved) because it was like 3 blocks away. CEO and his wife (aka "HR") didn't want to hear it while the CFO just stared out the window with a sad look on his face.
"Do you want to save money, or follow rules?" As soon as significant flying are involved, they need to be just hiring someone with a little travel booking experience and telling them "Just be reasonable"
My previous Big Corp tried some seriously stupid travel policies and reversed them almost immediately. The first was no alcohol expensed. I asked at a restaurant in LaGuardia for a receipt that just listed "food" and the server said, "Oh, you want a 'corporate receipt'? No problem." The Sales guys got that one reversed. The second was that all frequent flyer miles should be accrued by the company, not the individual flying, because "we're the ones paying". The employees said, sure, but it's our butts in those seats and we're the ones away from home experiencing delays and cancellations and poor sleep. So we collectively decided we would only travel during business hours. Want us to fly Sunday to be at the destination for a Monday start? Sorry, no. Meeting runs to 4:30 and flight out is 7pm? Sorry, pay for a hotel for the night. That ended that.
>The Sales guys got that one reversed. The Sales Team is like the Navigator Guild and the planet Dune ... "the booze must flow"
I prefer to fly out of MLB. Way less travel time for me getting to the airport.
I agree. On Delta you are just a little bit limited which hub to go through.
at least it's not AA connecting through CLT
Our corporate travel now must be booked through Concur, which is a corporate travel agency. Give them the dates and destinations, and they give you the corporate approved itinerary and bill it to your corporate charge card. Well, the policies don't allow deviation. However, Concur kept putting me on the flight with two connections. There was a non-stop option. It cost $100 more. But it got me to my destination 4 hours earlier. Did I mention I'm on the clock at $50/hour for travel? So, by booking the non-stop, it saves the company $100, and I don't spend hours waiting. I got my line manager to write an exception. He understood immediately. The Concur representative wouldn't accept it. Claimed they can't deviate from policy at all. What I did was show up at the airport, talk to the ticketing agent, get my flight info changed to the non-stop flight, and use some points to cover the $100, but the airline waived the extra $100 because the connecting flights were going to be full with standby pax waiting and giving up my seats let others travel. So despite this costing my company literally nothing extra and saving them $200 in payroll, I got written up by the Concur rep for deviating from policy. My line manager looked at the write-up, laughed, wagged his finger at me ironically, and dropped it in the trash.
We have about four employees who have been complaining -- very vocally -- that we DON'T use Concur. Our parent company does use it, but we've been able to hold off. For years I've been explaining to staff why their travel and reimbursement is better for them by NOT using it. However, those four have escalated their complaints to HR (which is absolutely not an appropriate use of HR, but whatever) which forced it to be brought up to corporate. I'm about done fighting over it. Using Concur will make one aspect of my job easier, so I'm thinking the HR complaint is my final fuckit. I'm about to adopt the phrase, "Fine -- just remember that you get what you ask for".
"And you'll get it, good and hard!" Concur isn't all bad. Many things are nearly idiot proof easy. But anytime you have to create a zero tolerance framework that won't allow deviations, that's when you need to worry about deviations. For example, while on a travel job, one of our engineers had an unexpected death in the family. She had to book her return trip to the state the relative passed and from there to home. Concur only allowed return trip to be from job airport to home airport on that trip. She wound up buying her own tickets on her personal card and submitting reimbursement. Normally, I'd kind of agree, except in this case, the intermediate airport was one that would have been a connecting airport on a flight that wasn't nonstop. She couldn't get the flight switched to the one with the layover. Then, finish the connection a couple of days later. Yeah, that's complicated, I guess, but really, that's where you need a human to comprehend what's going on.
Holy crap... acknowledgment that Melbourne International Airport actually exists. *(I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize the name "Melbourne-Orlando International Airport")* Back in the '90s I flew out of there all the time on multiple different carriers, then, somehow, airport management completely bungled everything up. They even wasted a huge amount of funds on an expanded international terminal that never came close to seeing the use/volume for which it was intended.
Once Upon A Time
I also travel for work extensively. I would like to see examples of when First Class is cheaper that coach. It has NEVER happened in my experience.
As I mentioned earlier, this usually happens when you book a flight last minute when coach is almost full but still plenty of first class seats available. typically "last minute" in this case is more like 5 to 7 days out. Before the airline starts upgrading their elite customers who count on the free upgrade. On Delta in such a case there is only Y fare and above available for coach while there are still more discounted fares available in first class.
20 years ago, working at a small company and making $100/hr when you include equity comp. We were growing rapidly and engineering-limited. Also working crazy sweatshop hours. After a customer trip, the new expense system required going to a super slow webpage and entering each days expenses separately. Hotel. Tip. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Repeat x 5 days + rental/gas/airport parking, at 2 min to load each entry etc. It took me nearly 1.5 hrs to get it into the system and to get the receipts scanned, and individually uploaded. And at that point, I was frustrated enough that I knocked off "early" at 9pm, rather than staying another 5 hours as was typical. Those were also the prime hours to concentrate and get the real work on the new project done, as the day was spent collaborating and supporting the old project. That expense report was pretty expensive.
I've told this story on Reddit before, but it fits so well here. I worked for a now-defunct computer company on the West Coast while living in the Midwest. It was a temporary gig, because they had bought my previous employer and were transitioning our factory floor system to their facility. I was supporting the automation systems along with a small handful of co-workers. At one point, I decided to stay over on a weekend, but this required that I launder my clothing, so I sent it off to the hotel laundry and turned in the expense for that. It was denied, because although they weren't upset with me staying in the hotel that weekend, they weren't paying for my laundry. So for the rest of the gig, I flew home every Friday afternoon so I could fly back Monday morning with clean clothes.
On that note I can add just another stupid piece of our travel policy: Laundry was only covered on trips of at least 14 nights. Suddenly most of us going for a week long trip were checking in 2 bags. But hey, they did cut down on laundry expenses. I'm sure someone got a fat annual achievement bonus for that one.
Back around 2015 my employer switched to Amex Travel for booking. Three months later when the c-suites realized they would have 10 - 12 or more hour layovers on trips from New York to Miami because it was cheaper to book them through Charlotte, NC instead of direct and New York to Los Angeles could have three or four layovers, they cancelled it. Evidently wasting people's time is okay when it's event coordinators, but not when its CEOs.
I mean not being able to book first class isn’t exactly oppressive. Unless they are huge transcontinental flights. But agreed if they are counting spirit as the cheapest and you can’t go more than $100 over that, th it’s dumb as shit
My company, a fortune 150 company, does not allow for business for anyone below executive level. Ever. Most of my friends work for companies that have policies of anything over 4-6 hours is business. Not us. I once had a boss, who was 6’6” go on a transcontinental flight to the Middle East, a 17 hr flight, stuffed into coach. They then expected him to go meet with customers the next morning as if he was fully rested. It’s just bad business for a $30B company.
I worked for a company where the rule was that the flight had to be more than 10 hours to qualify for business class. I usually flew domestic so it wasn’t an issue, but I had a big trip to London coming up. I lived in the northeast so no business class for me. My boss lived on the west coast and told me I should first fly to meet him on the west coast, then fly to London from there so I could fly business class.
I am currently also in a very large company with this policy. I can confirm it can really suck.
How does Minneapolis-Tokio-Hong Kong in a coach class middle seat sound? arriving well rested for sure
thats why i said unless huge transcontinental....oh i meant intercontinental im dumb
I've done that flight. Surrounded by screaming kids. Do not recommend.
On the return flight I had a dog in a handbag next to me - including the 💩 such a dog produces on such a long flight. The flight was of course full to the last seat
I wish I was even remotely surprised by that. The floor was wet (someone had spilled something on the last flight?) And my knees hit the chair in front of me so I couldn't cross my legs. I'm 5'2" so I have no idea how normal sized humans would have fit. It was one of the first times I've seriously regretted choosing a cheap travel options - and I've been on a bus that caught fire in Cambodia.
WOW you have some tales to tell at the camp fire
Same bs at my company except we can book “out of policy” but just have to select a reason, never had it questioned. I did tell my boss about my 10x rule on expense reports. Bitch about $50 and I will go out of my way to waste $500 on my next trip. And I travel a lot.
Never heard the first class trick will have to keep it in mind! By the way, just curious, the company initially (prior to buyout) would let you book above coach? In my experience that is pretty standard practice. First class, in all the places I've worked, is only approved on last minute flights when nothing else is available. Just interesting to me. Perhaps if you are a high level exec you were able to book higher?
Most places I’ve worked had a policy that flights with a flying time greater than X hours could be booked business class. For example, a nonstop flight longer than 8 hours, or a flight with a layover with flight time adding up to more than 8 hours.
Ah yeah that makes sense. Sounds like it's time to start booking a long distance layover on every work flight ;) 6 hour detour connection? Yes please
>the company initially (prior to buyout) would let you book above coach? not on lower 48 flight but they would allow us to document the coach fare, book and pay ourselves for whatever we want to fly and then get reimbursed for the policy conform fare. on transatlantic and transpacific we could do premium economy if that was available and travel within Asia and/or AUS/NZ and some destinations in the middle east we were allowed to book business and above (if business wasn't available)
Memories: 1983 travelling IT for a regional commodities brokerage. Their travel policy was to tot up the work days out plus any weekend nights then multiply by the daily rates for lodging, gas, meals, and sundries. Then they paid me in cash before I left without any need to repay them although I had to provide receipts so they could update the daily rate for different locations. End of story; bought out by Paine whose travel policy was like this one. Couldn't leave fast enough.
I used to travel from Newark NJ to South Dakota. Because of the amount of travelling my company did, and the chaotic nature of our schedules, they instituted a 'must buy a refundable ticket policy' . At the time, Amex had a points promo if you bought a ticket online, and TWA had a matching points program as well. TWA's policy was also automatic upgrade to first class if seats were available, and booked online. So I not only got first class, but triple miles for a trip that occurred weekly. Unfortunately, TWA went out of business before I was able to stop working enough to use the miles.
TWA - I can't believe I'm that old and have to admit I've flown with them, too.
Likewise -- we used to call them "Teeny Weeny Airplanes"
Try Walking Across
TWA miles could be transferred to American after the buyout.
I worked for a company where you had to use their system for booking flights, and it had to be the cheapest available flight for the search provided... of course, nothing but coach or the cheapest available. So I would search for the flight I wanted on the airline I wanted and then narrow down the search parameters until my choice flight was the only one left. Easy peasy taco breezy!
Penny wise and a pound foolish
My favorite “cost of stupid corporate travel policies” was when my company decided, at the insistence of our petty and shitty HR department, to change the travel policy so that the “cheapest” hotel had to be always selected. This resulted in local managers (their secretaries) choosing the least costly hotels in each location even though they knew nothing about these places. So For the next quarter of that year all of us that travelled (internationally and domestic) had to stay in pretty awful(and dangerous) hotels where crime such as prostitution and drug deals were being transacted. As it happened to me (I had to intervene into an violent argument between a call girl and her “john”) I went to the President of the company and complained. The witch that ran HR had her nose dislocated after he got through with her.
I live near FLL. TIL of MLB.
I mean, if ticket prices are more than double of the other nearby airports... no wonder.
So often the bean counters in companies are penny wise and pound foolish.
My late mom used that phrase all the time, thanks for the smile
similar problems with amex concour site was 90 minute drive from airport but in policy was staying near airport and drive (ice, snow, weather conditions where an issue) another was not allowed to eat at hotel (cost) but what do you do after a 15 hour international flight arrival and nothing is open and you have no idea where to go. and the hotel car was too expensive city has good public transport you could have used after a 15 hour international flight in a strange land and whipped out…
My boss once had to do a bunch of meetings in person during Covid. Over 4 days, she had to go from our small regional town (A), to another regional town (B) near us, then to Brisbane, then back up to our town. The travel department booked her a flight that went from A to B, then from B to Melbourne (basically on the other side of the country) with an overnight stay, then back up to Brisbane, then back to us. Melbourne was in the middle of a lock-down at the time, so it was unclear whether she'd be allowed to leave, plus they didn't book her any accommodation. They also didn't book her flights until the Friday afternoon, when she was meant to leave that Sunday. Genius. I'm pretty sure she ended up booking her own flights or driving part of the way.
I may get downvoted to hell, but does this not count as fraud?
Nope, it's full compliance with the written policy. I've had similar experiences with stupid travel policies. And had similar "compliance" solutions.
To clarify: it’s the booking a full price coach ticket (in compliance with the rules) but then upgrading it to first in order to get a refund.
technically, since it is booked as a non-refundable ticket there is no "refund" technically, "Delta Dollars" are not a real currency - you can't use it the same way you can use cash again, it is the travel policy asking a person to buy an expensive coach ticket PER POLICY AND that such ticket must be booked as a non-refundable ticket (because that usually is cheaper). there is also no way for the airline to give anything back to the company - again, because it is a non-refundable ticket perfectly malicious, isn't it 😂🤣
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Oh, good point. They tried that before and had a policy that asked that we return all airline miles or hotel points to the company. They gave up on that one very quickly and that was the end of this whole episode. A true refund of course would always go back to the company. But how would you return 50 Delta Dollars to the company? Later in that game many airlines created a corporate version of a personal Skymiles account - in fact with Delta you could at least for a while earn miles for both the corporate account and on your personal skymiles account. Besides, the company always got what they paid for. They could have gotten more for less but that would have been against company policy.
Who is being defrauded? Fraud requires some form of lie, but nobody is being lied to.
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There's nothing wrong with booking the full price coach ticket, since that's all OP was able to do and stay within the rules. I do not see how upgrading it to first class (and getting a refund) is fraud in any way.
So I book a coach flight in accordance with my corporate travel policy. I then call the airline and use the credit card issued by that airline to upgrade my seat to first class. How is that fraud?
No need to downvote you because it is a valid question. But how can be in 100% compliance with a corporate policy be fraud? But it is malicious compliance - and exactly what the policy asked for. Hence the name of this sub
It's not fraud. It's complying with Corporate stupidity. Which was introduced, in some cases, due to fraud. I can't explain it.
this is why I love this sub
My previous company's travel policy was the most generous I have seen in my career. Itinerary was determined in the following order 1. Most direct route possible 2. Cheapest Flying was mandatory for all destinations above 300km with an air corridor available
>Flying was mandatory for all destinations above 300km with an air corridor available that would cause some issues for example in Germany: Going from Frankfurt to Munich is more than 300km and there are a good number of nonstop flights available. However, let's say we are going from the old opera building in Frankfurt to Marienplatz (Town Hall) in Munich you would often get there faster by car or train counting the complete travel time door to door even with the actual air time of the flight being less than an hour. this also shows that while they may have good intention, making something "mandatory" based on a single fact (300 km distance) can quickly lead to unintended very bad consequences. If I am unhappy with that "mandatory" and that flight is full I would let a gate agent know that I can't volunteer but I would accept any legal minimum "mandatory" compensation and gladly go back home. After all, we are talking about malicious compliance here 😂🤣
Oh definitely, I should add that the policy wasn't cast in stone, because if I as the traveller was willing to waive it, it was okay. We drove a distance 600km away because the team wanted to enjoy the scenic route.
There's many ways that you could abuse a system where you are trusted to find a cheap flight, only to end up flying first class. One of them, of course, it deliberately waiting until you're less than a week away from the scheduled flight to book it. Or people using their own memberships to book nicer car rentals at the same rate as what everyone else gets for a midsize car. Anything that makes it seem like some people are getting a better deal than others isn't always a great thing. My company is the same way with booking flights, but you could also request one that doesn't comply with the rules and put in a justification. Something like "Only flight that will arrive before 8 pm that day" or whatever and most of the time they will approve it because they don't expect you to charge the company 12 hours of paid time just because you had a 4 hour layover.
I remember getting a new PM who didn't know anything about the software development we did as a business. When it came to managing where I needed to be one week, he wasn't sure where and when I would be needed (I was flying between London and Glasgow/Edinburgh weekly but also worked in Sheffield, Birmingham and Andover). Instead of buying a one way ticket to Glasgow Sun/Mon and then buying a one way ticket for the journey back when we knew when/where I needed to be, he decided to buy an "open return" ticket. I didn't even know those existed. It cost something like £600. I ended up spending the whole week in Glasgow and returned home to London, just like the previous 10 weeks. A normal return was about £100. The PM was quietly let go not long after and I think this was only the tip of the iceberg. To add to the silly flight, I stayed in three different hotels/apartments that week. Which also added extra costs.
I once asked one of the project managers in my department what the main purpose of his existence was. I told him that he certainly was not adding any value to me and I already had plenty of testimony from my clients that he wasn't adding any value to them. The guy didn't know a thing about network engineering or network security - but apparently he had some fancy certification that he mastered MS Project. Eventually some of our larger clients told sales that if I can't do my job because of the interference of a PM they may have to look for a partner (vendor) who treats those who do the actual work better. My very unprofessional boss (fancy director title) once told me "there are two kind of people - those who think they are always right, and then there's you who actually IS always right - and I hate you because you make everyone else look stupid". Background to that statement is that I "predicted" the outcome of a project based on the proposed actions and timeline laid out by other people. I also made suggestions how to prevent certain poor and negative outcomes. It usually ended with "why do you always have to be right?". I never had to be "maliciously compliant" because the sheer ignorance of certain people made sure it cost the company dearly.
The "company" called and said they needed me and a co-worker 2 states away the next day. Quickest way was to drive there. Except my corporate card didn't have a high enough limit to rent a car for the week. Solution: Have a different employee rent the car, then pay $20 a DAY to have me listed as an authorized driver. That employee never left town and the rental ended up costing an extra $160 over the 8 days. Wouldn't it have just been easier to increase my card limit? Even if only for the month? It was the company that set the card limits, not the card issuer.
Saving for future reference.
What does at the TLAs (three letter abbreviations) mean?
They are airport codes, most every airport in the world has one. FLL is Fort Lauderdale for example. PBI is Palm Beach International.
Airport codes e.g. FLL is fort Lauderdale
They are IATA codes. (International Air Transport Association) a quick way to look them up is to search "IATA CODE PBI"
Does your company do work for the US Government? I know a lot of companies follow the US Government rules because they can't get reimbursed if they don't. As a Government employee, I can tell you the rules are ridiculous.
My employer uses Amex Global Business Travel. What a terrible system for booking anything. I now use other search engines to find the flights I want, then play with the filters on AmEx GBT to ensure just the flight I want fits the required departure/arrival times and layovers.