In a distributed company travel becomes essential to keep team coherence: anything from team activities to meeting up to decide on the direction of big projects

In a distributed company travel becomes essential to keep team coherence: anything from team activities to meeting up to decide on the direction of big projects (no online tool can beat a single room with a single whiteboard and a single marker in terms of usability and speed). There are also meetings and travel to partners, to industry conferences and forums etc. (depends on teams). In "tough times" all that is suddenly cut off, and only "essential travel" is allowed. But then some teams get to spend two weeks in Malibu on an "essential travel spa retreat" while their teams cannot even send engineers to a high stakes technical discussions with external party integrations. And of course "essential travel" somehow doesn't include various levels of sales, management and marketing. So, people get grumpy.