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I still miss it for biz travel to be honest. A typical input to a business trip is something like, "i need to be in Dallas for a 9am on Tuesday, SF for a team m

I still miss it for biz travel to be honest. A typical input to a business trip is something like, "i need to be in Dallas for a 9am on Tuesday, SF for a team meet at 11 on Thursday and I have a call at 1230 the same day." Travel sites make the user futz around trying to find a schedule that works, is in policy, and isnt ridiculous. This can easily take an hour or more, even worse when multiple colleagues are involved. Much better to have a specialist do it who knows geography really well (eg Kansas City airport is not near kansas city), understands the corporate policy, knows your travel preferences etc. But no, we outsource the job to all the employees and burn their time instead. seems weird to me.

drewg123 4y ago
I remember when I was at Google (2013->15), the travel system was "gamified", and was an enormous waste of time. You had to come in at or below the median price for a trip. If you came in below the median, you could bank the difference and eventually use it to get a nicer hotel, first class upgrade, etc on future travel. And if you came in over the median, and had no banked credits, you had to get a VP to sign off on your expense report. This all sounds great on paper, and I'm sure it reduced the travel expense line in Google's budget. But unanticipated effect was that you had engineers making mid 6-figure total comp spending way too much of their time finding travel deals so they could come in below the median. Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.
ghaff 4y ago
>nows your travel preferences Except they don't really. I often like to see the tradeoffs laid out for me and, if it's not obvious, maybe spend a bit of time thinking about it--especially if I'm mixing in some personal time as well.
ghaff 4y ago
I also think you're attributing way too much knowledge to "specialists" at a generic travel agency. As far as they're concerned you can (as most people will) just grab a taxi from the airport to your hotel--or rent a car--however far. I doubt they'd know about BART from SFO to downtown and TBH most of my co-workers likely wouldn't even consider a transit option either even if it were basically as convenient as a cab, as in the example. As I wrote in another comment there are specialist services that deal with mostly pleasure travel in particular locales but that's different from the traditional travel agent who mostly booked cruises, flights on major carriers, tours, and business or resort hotels.
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  Certainly agree that calling a generic agency would be a miss. You need in house expertise. It is certainly possible for a small slice of the business (I cant imagine that Satya or Sundar or Jeff spend hours on Concur or Expedia, say), but scaling that to cover the whole thing would be very valuable (and quite difficult).
  - ghaff 4y ago
    They have executive admins (or multiple) and others who handle all the details--and they also don't expect to grab a few hours off for sightseeing unless that's explicitly part of their schedule. Otherwise they're probably eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with customers. And, of course, that's not really scalable and I imagine a lot of technical people would absolutely hate to be working that way.

drewg123 4y ago

I remember when I was at Google (2013->15), the travel system was "gamified", and was an enormous waste of time. You had to come in at or below the median price for a trip. If you came in below the median, you could bank the difference and eventually use it to get a nicer hotel, first class upgrade, etc on future travel. And if you came in over the median, and had no banked credits, you had to get a VP to sign off on your expense report. This all sounds great on paper, and I'm sure it reduced the travel expense line in Google's budget. But unanticipated effect was that you had engineers making mid 6-figure total comp spending way too much of their time finding travel deals so they could come in below the median. Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.

ghaff 4y ago

>nows your travel preferences Except they don't really. I often like to see the tradeoffs laid out for me and, if it's not obvious, maybe spend a bit of time thinking about it--especially if I'm mixing in some personal time as well.

ghaff 4y ago

I also think you're attributing way too much knowledge to "specialists" at a generic travel agency. As far as they're concerned you can (as most people will) just grab a taxi from the airport to your hotel--or rent a car--however far. I doubt they'd know about BART from SFO to downtown and TBH most of my co-workers likely wouldn't even consider a transit option either even if it were basically as convenient as a cab, as in the example. As I wrote in another comment there are specialist services that deal with mostly pleasure travel in particular locales but that's different from the traditional travel agent who mostly booked cruises, flights on major carriers, tours, and business or resort hotels.

kjellsbells 4y ago
Certainly agree that calling a generic agency would be a miss. You need in house expertise. It is certainly possible for a small slice of the business (I cant imagine that Satya or Sundar or Jeff spend hours on Concur or Expedia, say), but scaling that to cover the whole thing would be very valuable (and quite difficult).
- ghaff 4y ago
  They have executive admins (or multiple) and others who handle all the details--and they also don't expect to grab a few hours off for sightseeing unless that's explicitly part of their schedule. Otherwise they're probably eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with customers. And, of course, that's not really scalable and I imagine a lot of technical people would absolutely hate to be working that way.