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At my old SP500 firm, Corp travel agents were always - and I mean ALWAYS - worse than what I could get from the airline directly. Why? Internal accounting. Som

At my old SP500 firm, Corp travel agents were always - and I mean ALWAYS - worse than what I could get from the airline directly. Why? Internal accounting. Some part of HR got to count part of the "fee" as revenue, billed against my travel budget. Insane. Once that became common knowledge, my coworkers and I were 'strongky encouraged' by our department head to buy travel with our Corp cards. This led to a strongly worded memo from the head of HR at FY end demanding we stop the process. That led to meetings, committees, more dueling memos. Great use of everyone's time. I am so glad I don't work there anymore.

Spooky23 6y ago
Yup, that's pretty common with legacy contracts. Internal accounting bullshit ruins all sorts of things. I worked at a place where "thou shalt" use some stupid travel agent to buy intercity train tickets. You had to call the company and pick up the paper ticket in some inconvenient place between the hours of 10-3, closed from 12-1. The ticket cost ~$5-10 more than buying it at the train station, split between the travel agent and procurement group, unless you purchased it a month in advance, and could be used for 6 months. The "hack" was that business units with lots of travel would buy 100 at a time every couple of months, and you'd need to find a secretary with a stash to get a paper ticket. I would ply them with my wife's baking to ensure a steady supply. Not surprisingly, many tickets were wasted unused (in pursuit of saving the $5), or people took unnecessary trips to avoid wasting money on tickets (and wasting 3x more in per diems, etc). The next innovation was to declare that the trip was an emergency, and then you could buy the ticket from the conductor, in cash. The penance for less hassle is that you had to write a sad tale about why attending a training class met some standard for "emergency" travel.
cosmie 6y ago
My company used to be like that, but was acquired last year and the company that acquired us has such a refreshing travel process: - Booking fees are itemized and stated up front. $3 for bookings handled 100% via the online reservation system, $25 if you ever have to talk to an actual agent. - The online reservation system shows publicly listed rates as well as negotiated rates, and you're free to choose what you want within policy. The negotiated rates were virtually never the cheapest, but they also tended to come with a lot more flexibility (i.e. no change fees, refundable up to time of departure, 24 hour cancellation of hotel reservations, etc). Those two aspects, combined with the fact that the travel would ultimately be booked to your card on file anyway (generally a corp card for anyone traveling frequently), pretty much negates any incentive to go outside of the official travel system. Depending on the trip and your travel budget, you can either go with the riskier but cheaper options or go with the more flexible but also more expensive options. The default booking fee is tiny enough to be understandable, and the incremental $22 fee ends up well worth it in the situations you need to call the travel team's 1-800 number to get you out of a bind. The old system didn't bother me much as I was used to it being The Way Companies Are. But after being spoiled here, I dread the day I end up in another travel-heavy job and have to go back to the more typical Big Corp travel process.
devdas 6y ago
A lot of companies also have special deals with preferred airlines, which gets the company a refund if a certain volume of money is spent. So you would see worse pricing upfront, but the company would spend a lot less after the discount numbers were reached.

Spooky23 6y ago

Yup, that's pretty common with legacy contracts. Internal accounting bullshit ruins all sorts of things. I worked at a place where "thou shalt" use some stupid travel agent to buy intercity train tickets. You had to call the company and pick up the paper ticket in some inconvenient place between the hours of 10-3, closed from 12-1. The ticket cost ~$5-10 more than buying it at the train station, split between the travel agent and procurement group, unless you purchased it a month in advance, and could be used for 6 months. The "hack" was that business units with lots of travel would buy 100 at a time every couple of months, and you'd need to find a secretary with a stash to get a paper ticket. I would ply them with my wife's baking to ensure a steady supply. Not surprisingly, many tickets were wasted unused (in pursuit of saving the $5), or people took unnecessary trips to avoid wasting money on tickets (and wasting 3x more in per diems, etc). The next innovation was to declare that the trip was an emergency, and then you could buy the ticket from the conductor, in cash. The penance for less hassle is that you had to write a sad tale about why attending a training class met some standard for "emergency" travel.

cosmie 6y ago

My company used to be like that, but was acquired last year and the company that acquired us has such a refreshing travel process: - Booking fees are itemized and stated up front. $3 for bookings handled 100% via the online reservation system, $25 if you ever have to talk to an actual agent. - The online reservation system shows publicly listed rates as well as negotiated rates, and you're free to choose what you want within policy. The negotiated rates were virtually never the cheapest, but they also tended to come with a lot more flexibility (i.e. no change fees, refundable up to time of departure, 24 hour cancellation of hotel reservations, etc). Those two aspects, combined with the fact that the travel would ultimately be booked to your card on file anyway (generally a corp card for anyone traveling frequently), pretty much negates any incentive to go outside of the official travel system. Depending on the trip and your travel budget, you can either go with the riskier but cheaper options or go with the more flexible but also more expensive options. The default booking fee is tiny enough to be understandable, and the incremental $22 fee ends up well worth it in the situations you need to call the travel team's 1-800 number to get you out of a bind. The old system didn't bother me much as I was used to it being The Way Companies Are. But after being spoiled here, I dread the day I end up in another travel-heavy job and have to go back to the more typical Big Corp travel process.

devdas 6y ago

A lot of companies also have special deals with preferred airlines, which gets the company a refund if a certain volume of money is spent. So you would see worse pricing upfront, but the company would spend a lot less after the discount numbers were reached.