[throwaway2037]

I see this constantly in my industry. Mid-level managers (and above) are always trying to max travel miles on company expense. If I ran my own company (dream!), I would never allow employees to reap "travel miles" from travel paid for by the company. It is ridiculous.

[ok_dad]

The company isn’t using the travel miles. You’re basically saying, “I’ll take away a small perk from people who are forced to travel.” It’s not like they’re stealing from the company, the company sent them somewhere else and they just got a tiny bonus for it.

The proper thing to so is stop those managers who travel too much.

[siren2026]

The issue is that it creates an incentive to maximize the cost of travel as the employee directly get miles based on the price.

I see this all the time with employees/managers booking a 1000$ flight that will give them 10k miles instead of a perfectly fine 400$ flight that would only give them 4k miles.

[eightysixfour]

Every travel system I have worked with at [big corps] required the cost of my flight to be within a specific range of the average for that route. I wouldn’t have been able to take a $1k if a $400 was available without an override by the person whose budget it was coming from.

Most of them we couldn’t pay on our own card either, so no points from that, but I’m not aware of any way to block someone from adding their frequent flyer number to a booked ticket.

[rogerrogerr]

Mine makes us take the "least cost logical" option, but it only looks at flights that match your current search (airport, day, time window). So if you have a specific flight you want, it's usually trivial to concoct a search where that flight is the lowest cost in a window.

[zamadatix]

I travel quite a bit for work, e.g. the last 30 days I've been home for 4 while travelling to 6 cities spread over 4 countries and 5 time zones, and that's not how I understood what they are saying at all. If you want a perk for travelling, these points based systems are the most Kafkaesque way imaginable to give so little for it.

And often it is like they are stealing from the company. I remember seeing on LinkedIn a ${seniorExec} of a place I worked at posting how they are a million miler first class traveler on airline X but they'll be switching to airline Y exclusively from now on because X's point system isn't as good anymore. The moral of the post was supposed to be something about treating your customers right for loyalty or something, what I took away from it is this person is throwing away my entire trip travel budget on individual flights because they are selecting how to get the best kickback. Meanwhile I'm trying to get approval to chop 4 hours off what should be an 8 hour door to door flight by spending $120 more than the recommended flight to avoid an extra hop and layover because that just makes no $ sense from a hours perspective.

The best perk I ever got for travel was an actual pay increase for it, many times larger than any hotel or flights points program has ever been worth to me. If you want to give your travelling employees a perk then that is a real way to do it, not a few brand specific dollars for each part of the trip you have to sign up for.

[marklar423]

I've always understood it as a perk the company knowingly allows its employees who need to travel.

[cloche]

Why would you want to ruin morale for no reason?

[sweetjuly]

Are you going to ask your employees for their 2% cashback if you reimburse them for a purchase they made with their credit card too?

At the end of the day, it seems more practical to focus on ensuring that they picked the appropriate value product/service. If they picked appropriately, does it matter if the company gives them employee a kickback? Sure, the employee will then be incentivized to get the most expensive thing they can, but this was already the case because it's not their money and they want the best thing they can get away with.

[OptionOfT]

In Germany those things are taxed!