"Michael" wrote in message m...

If you're shipping an employee around the country, he must have some
valuable skills. How much is it costing you to have him sitting
around for extra hours, being mostly unproductive? How much is it
costing you when you **** him off by putting him on the most
inconvenient but cheapest available flight, and he decides not to work
those extra hours to get the project done on time? Those costs are
very real, and probably greater than anything you might save on the
price of the ticket, but they're not so easy to quantify and in any
case the ticket price is right here right now, and the other costs
probably won't show up this quarter and maybe not even this year.

This is why we don't let the accountants set the travel policy.
Even when I was working for the federal government, I successfully
fought some rediculous travel arrangements that was not advantageous
to the overall picture of the government. Usually all it takes is to
have your supervisor have some balls to authorize it. Even without
that, savvy gov't travellers know what the rules are and how to exploit them
(to the point of requiring the gov't pay for a rental car to go to non preferred
airports, invoking the fact that they can't make you start a trip outside of duty
hours, etc...