Handling "Basic Economy" flight fares with hidden a-la-carte fees

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
>    It seems like SFC's most limited resource, by a long shot, is staff
>    time.  Where is the balance between spending more staff time reviewing
>    travel expenses and devising new and more complex travel policies and
>    member time adhering to these policies, against just establishing an
>    easy, but potentially somewhat more costly or vague policy?

Vague policies require *more* staff time, as it requires us to scrutinize and
consider the receipts, and document why we believe the expense is reasonable.
Great example: we used to have a vague policy about M&IE.  If I ever see
another airport hamburger receipt in my life, it'll be too soon.  The M&IE
policy is very formal, slightly complex, but it means that even when a
traveler screws up and sends food receipts, I can just ignore them and
compute a rote formula to give them M&IE funds.

It's also true for the Max Lodging rates published on the same reports;
while we have a minor bug to fix on that, generally speaking, it means
that hotels are easy to deal with.  Our challenge is transportation
part as we can't punt to a known vetted list for pricing.

As mentioned in other threads, we've tried various 'short cut' methods and
our auditors rejected them.  The IRS is also pretty strict about travel stuff.

As I said in my rant post, I really really hate how much time I personally
spend interpreting the travel policy.  I'd being willing to consider that
our entire approach so far is maybe wrong-headed, except that there are
many travelers who file near-perfect requests and have commented that they
think the policy is good and reasonable.

There is a disconnect somewhere; my rant post talks some about what they
might be.

The only idea that I've seen that has any hope to it is one Michael Downey
made on IRC -- that perhaps a travel agent company could be outsourced to do
travel policy enforcement.  I'd love it if this were a service we could
buy. It's not clear to me though that such a service readily exists to handle
all aspects.  Maybe we could *just* use them for transportation side?

--
Bradley M. Kuhn

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