loopback0 – Douglas Gourlay's Blog Data Centers, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing

Personal, Business, and Government Travel

a view the tax receiver rarely sees

I read an interesting article last night on Cisco System's travel policies.  Having lived through this change at first I thought it a bit onerous, but the savings were marked and it quickly reduced the T&E component of my departmental budget freeing up funds for other, more compelling activities.

Companies like Cisco are pretty smart about travel policy-  they try to book every ticket through one travel agent, and that travel agent uses one central credit card for all billing of air-travel.  They strongly recommend a 14 to 21-day advance purchase for the ticket and anything less than that takes pretty senior approval. We were also requiring that the ticket purchased be non-refundable because the change fees (varying between $75 and $150) were much less than the price of a full-fare refundable ticket.

For our government officials and workers though life is quite different.  Many times over the past years I have been on trips where the government employee I am talking to in the gate area lines up and flies business class while I am not-so-comfortably ensconced in coach.  Like the next guy I am all for using points, miles, and about anything possible to get upgraded to the more humane seat widths and leg space that is available in business or even better the lie-flat seat/sofas offered to the elite in first class.

While the taxpayer is flying in coach, the bourgeois US government staffers, politicians, appointees, and rank and file can often travel in much better accommodations.  In principle alone this is somewhat wrong, but the ways the government employees get their business class fares is even worse than that - they purchase full-fare refundable coach tickets, the kind that are almost always automatically upgraded to business class by the airlines.  On a recent trip this was the difference between $800 for my ticket versus $5500 for the refundable upgraded fare.  Our tax dollars at work.

I've seen several airlines extend policies to their corporate partners that gave automatic business class upgrades to full-fare paying coach ticketed executives.  What happened was the execs always tried to get the last-minute full-fare tickets, thus policies like Cisco's trying to head that off at the pass because the airlines were dangling incentives that encouraged frivolous spending.

Our government should do the following:  1) Centralize all government travel under one contract.  2) require lowest priced airfare be purchased and a 14-21 day advance ticket be required without senior approval.  3) Publish a list of all elected official and appointed official travel and costs in arrears as well, if not classified, the purpose of the trip.  4) under no circumstances should a public official be flying in business or first class unless they personally pay for it with cash, miles, or some personally earned upgrade plan.

EDIT - just a few days after I initially wrote this Congress decided that flying in full-fare coach wasn't enough of a burden on the tax-payer, but they needed several Boeing Business Jets, and a handful of Gulfstream G5s. For those of you unfamiliar with the Gulfstream G5 it is a favorite subject of rap musicians and I think Roger Federer uses one too. But hey, nothing's too good for our representatives.

dg