This reminds me of a job I once had that was about 50% travel; the company required employees to charge travel expenses to their personal credit cards, saying they would be reimbursed. The company consistently dragged its feet on the reimbursement, sometimes for several months. They scrutinized reported expenses to an absurd level, or simply refused to pay. I once had a layover on a flight (because the company required the least expensive flight, which was generally not direct) that was cancelled. I was stuck in Denver for 9 hours, waiting for an available flight. I got something to eat and reported it as a travel expense. Denied; I was told the expense didn't occur in the city where I was working, so it was personal, not business-related. A colleague had her credit card maxed with business travel charges, and could only afford to make the minimum payment for several months. She requested the company pay the interest on the carried charges. Take a guess how that went? Denied. She ended up quitting, and last I heard the company refused to reimburse her because she was no longer an employee. I ended up quitting, too. But yeah, this article reminded me of that situation. When it's known that you're basically powerless to collect on a debt, you can expect to get screwed.
I suppose many of us are lucky to work in high-margin software businesses. I spent 15 years often travelling for work (typically very distributed companies) before the pandemic. Four separate companies. Everything paid on my personal CC. I preferred it that way so that I could optimize the flights/etc to make it fit my personal life. Everything reimbursed swiftly with zero questions since I never did anything really stupid. The only real bottleneck was myself; filing all of those damned receipts for every trip.
Having some kind of centralized travel booking service that "took care of everything" would likely have caused me to find another job. For one company I did a monthly 6h travel + a few days of hotel + 6h travel thing for a decade. Not being in total control over that would simply not have been feasible.
I have no idea how people doing a large amount of travel for stereotypical low-margin large companies manage to get by.
> Having some kind of centralized travel booking service that "took care of everything" would likely have caused me to find another job
Having worked at both kinds of companies, I vastly preferred having a travel agent that took care of everything.
For example: one time I had a later flight with a layover. The initial flight was delayed on the tarmac before takeoff, and immediately upon landing, a person called me telling me there were no more flights that evening to my final destination, but they'd already booked me a hotel near the airport and the first flight out in the morning to my final destination, and asked me if I'd like any modifications. Perhaps someone else who wants more control would like to handle that stuff themselves, but for me, it was a massive luxury to have an experienced professional automatically smooth over any problem I encountered during my travel. I certainly didn't miss keeping all my crumpled receipts and submitting expense reports either.
This is the reason why I refuse to pay for any work travel expenses with my credit card.
I once worked for a company that had a similar travel process. When I was asked to travel, I insisted that my VP have his assistant schedule and pay for everything. When I arrived at the hotel on one trip, the hotel asked me for a credit card to pay for the booking. I stepped out of line and called my VP to have him fax his card info to the hotel.
I understand this wouldn't work for everyone but I think it's ok to question the policy and see how much flexibility there is. In my case, I was able to avoid taking on personal liability for my employer's expenses by pushing back and working with my VP to find a solution that I was comfortable with.
While it's legal for employers to require employees to use personal credit cards for work-related expenses, it's a huge labor code violation not to timely reimburse employees for such expenses.
As in, huge mandatory fines on top of reimbursing employees for 100% of their costs (including interest and other charges incurred related to late reimbursement) type of violation.
If you're not willing to name and shame here, please report it to the state's Dept of Labor if this was within the past 5 years so current employees can be protected.
if this is US, file a wage claim with local state government. Reimbursement for expenses while traveling is valid.
Depending on the state you can file many years later after you've left the job. So feel free to get a new job and file a claim with a spreadsheet of what they missed.
From the time you arrive at a departure airport, to the time that you arrive at the destination airport, is general considered “paid” (non-exempt) travel time.
However, to my knowledge, there is no federal law that an employer is required to reimburse you for any of your travel-related expenses. (Which is, in itself, ridiculous.)
why wait until after you quit? before you quit you get to use your worktime to deal with the lawsuit (just because) and if they harass you at work for suing them, you add that to the lawsuit. if they fire you, add that too.
I'm trying to think how I would ideally set up such a system. The person traveling is in the best position to determine the most cost effective way to travel. Ideally you could somehow determine or negotiate ahead of time what travel expenses should be and then just pay that to the employee. Then they would just travel as they like and either pocket any savings they can find, fly cheaper if they value their time less than the saved money or pay extra if they value flying first class.
The way Google did it was that you listed where you were going and what dates and they did some sort of magical formula to figure out your max allowable costs for the trip. They were always well above the minimum costs. For every $2 below the cap, you got $1 to be able to exceed the cap in the future. It ended up working out so about every 5 economy trips you could do one business class trip (depending on how economical you were). I felt like it aligned the incentives well.
«A Booking.com market manager in south-east Asia admitted at a recent industry event that payment delays were caused by the installation of a new payment system. Staff salaries were also affected, she said, explaining it as a risk they had to take.»
It seems like there is a misunderstanding of who is on the taking and receiving end of risks
Sad to see the top comments in the thread not even bothering to discuss the technical reasons and legal implications behind this .. and instead everyone wants to just discuss unrelated anecdotes about their personal travels.
The story here is about how booking.com is screwing over hotels and hostels, not guests. Someone should create a different thread for that, because apparently people have a very strong need to tell their tangentially related stories.
You've seen how discussions work in real life right? There's no requirement to stick to some topic at hand, it's a free-flowing dialogue. That's what you're seeing happen in this discussion board too.
Real companies have competent adults build and test this type of thing so they don’t stiff their vendors or miss payroll. It’s not an area where you should let techbros move fast and break things.
It’s booking.com, they are notorious for not being competent adults. Just check out this article about their working conditions [1] (you might want to google translate it you happen to not speak Dutch).
A Booking.com market manager in south-east Asia admitted at a recent industry event that payment delays were caused by the installation of a new payment system. Staff salaries were also affected, she said, explaining it as a risk they had to take.
From an earlier article:
In the company’s August results, CFO David Goulden said there were "lower than expected" IT expenses in the second quarter of this year, in part due to phasing IT spend into the third quarter, but did not outline what this IT expense included.
It's interesting to see prevailing negative sentiment about booking here. My experience is completely different: usually a very nice place, no surprises, two times the host has done something wrong (cancelled my reservation or didn't respond) booking support was very quick to help me.
On the other hand I consider Airbnb to be a scam enabling company that does everything to screw the customer and appease the hosts. Their reviews are worthless as they remove mentions of problems regularly and you will never know what you're getting until you arrive at the location. Forget about getting your money back if the host screws you as well - they will string you along from one support call to another and then pretend none of this happened.
It's no surprise shady hosts prefer Airbnb to booking as it's easier to keep your trap offerings online for longer.
I had a few horrible experiences with Booking.com and the others where I'd arrive at the hotel and they'd never heard of me, or I'd ask for an extra day in person but the hotel couldn't help me because I didn't book directly with them, or they didn't serve breakfast but Booking said they did and the hotel was in the middle of nowhere etc.
I finally wised up. Hotels basically hate guests who book with a service like Booking.com and they will not lift a finger to help you if anything goes wrong.
Now I use Booking.com, Kayak, etc to find hotels in the general area I need, then use google or DDG to find the website of the hotel (a process much easier said than done because the booking sites SEO the hell out of search engine results), then book directly with the hotel or its parent chain.
I guess this will never satisfy everyone, because my experience is the opposite. I've been using booking.com for about 10 years and the only things that kinda went wrong were when I didn't. So yeah, I've not had to test their failure procedure yet, but at least I've never experienced anything I booked not being available. (I had one hotel take my card payment on arrival and it was also done via booking but I blame the weird hotel here, booking refunded without problems).
I wish someone from the accommodation industry would tell us all how the central booking system and most hotel chains are abusing everyone, from inn and hotel owners to end customers. Their contracts are pure gold, in the sense that they cloak all possibility of independence under a thick cover nothing can pierce through. Tourism, they are killing it, literally.
There are multiple GDSs, and AFAIK neither Expedia nor Booking.com use them. The space is way more confused and competitive then your comment implies. The best writeup I've seen on the space is https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/hotel-api/, if you really want to dive into the details.
What do you mean by "central booking system"? As far as I know (working on a rental car contract for a couple years), there are just various travel industry standards for bookings and whatnot.
GDS.
A Global Distribution System is a worldwide reservation system that acts as a conduit between travel bookers and suppliers, such as hotels, other accommodation providers and other travel related services.
I mean there is only one pipeline, to which are contributing many actors, like big agencies (booking, expedia), car rental, airlines, etc. Together, they act as one.
I've taken to calling hotels directly and dealing with them, or their chain's booking, as they offer the same or better rates usually, are more accountable, are more willing to refund or cancel without problems, and are much more interested in keeping you happy and wanting to come back.
I am a full time digital nomad and stay in a ton of hotels. I have once gotten the same rate directly, usually it is 20-30% higher. Hotels basically force you to third parties.
My last experience dealing directly with the hotel, I called to cancel. Later, they tried to charge me for the whole trip. The whole system was to just call a person, with no confirmation provided.
The hotel did not give a rats ass about how happy I was, if I wanted to come back, and were not accountable. They basically gaslit me. The person pretended I was crazy or stealing, and I would surely have proof otherwise.
In most systems, you get some kind of ticket notification. I really felt I would be better with any portal system. I know booking can be shitty too, but dealing with hotels individually just seems worse to me.
By the way, they finally only charged me for one day. Chargeback rejected. Assume all of your chargebacks will be rejected if you don't have evidence. They WILL side against you, in favor of a large hotel at least (I don't think they were a chain either).
In Dominican Republic I was told to just use an online booking site as it was much cheaper than doing it in person. Their own site was also more expensive than expedia.
Not my experience, especially when you actually break down the cancellation policies (which booking aggregators will sometimes charge extra for) and whether they require payment up front or at the time of arrival.
When I last did this, for a vacation, the cost at an aggregator was less if there was no cancellation allowed, and more if the option to cancel was added (but to a couple days before I believe), and needed to be paid at time of booking. When I called, I got a rate slightly less than the online+cancellation, I was able to cancel up to 24 hours in advance, and I only needed to pay on arrival, meaning I didn't tie up a few thousand for a few months.
There's also always the option to state the rate you found online and see if they are willing to match it. It's not like there usually some magic involved, if they're willing to offer it to an aggregator, why wouldn't they at least consider offering it to you direct?
Yup this is nonsense advice. I will say in most cases, it seems around the same. I highly suspect most hotels aren't prepared to negotiate over the phone.
As I said elsewhere, the hotel's support can be even worse, and amount to them basically robbing you.
Their support is pretty bad.. they refused to refund a £20 booking when the hotel was 500km away from where it was shown on the map. There were no other contact options, so I took them to the UK Small Claims Court... They paid up before the case went to court.
Readit News
Having some kind of centralized travel booking service that "took care of everything" would likely have caused me to find another job. For one company I did a monthly 6h travel + a few days of hotel + 6h travel thing for a decade. Not being in total control over that would simply not have been feasible.
I have no idea how people doing a large amount of travel for stereotypical low-margin large companies manage to get by.
Having worked at both kinds of companies, I vastly preferred having a travel agent that took care of everything.
For example: one time I had a later flight with a layover. The initial flight was delayed on the tarmac before takeoff, and immediately upon landing, a person called me telling me there were no more flights that evening to my final destination, but they'd already booked me a hotel near the airport and the first flight out in the morning to my final destination, and asked me if I'd like any modifications. Perhaps someone else who wants more control would like to handle that stuff themselves, but for me, it was a massive luxury to have an experienced professional automatically smooth over any problem I encountered during my travel. I certainly didn't miss keeping all my crumpled receipts and submitting expense reports either.
I've heard similar stories to this from people working at high-margin software businesses before too.
It could be something along the lines of "depends which team you're in", as to who's being screwed over or not.
I once worked for a company that had a similar travel process. When I was asked to travel, I insisted that my VP have his assistant schedule and pay for everything. When I arrived at the hotel on one trip, the hotel asked me for a credit card to pay for the booking. I stepped out of line and called my VP to have him fax his card info to the hotel.
I understand this wouldn't work for everyone but I think it's ok to question the policy and see how much flexibility there is. In my case, I was able to avoid taking on personal liability for my employer's expenses by pushing back and working with my VP to find a solution that I was comfortable with.
As in, huge mandatory fines on top of reimbursing employees for 100% of their costs (including interest and other charges incurred related to late reimbursement) type of violation.
If you're not willing to name and shame here, please report it to the state's Dept of Labor if this was within the past 5 years so current employees can be protected.
Depending on the state you can file many years later after you've left the job. So feel free to get a new job and file a claim with a spreadsheet of what they missed.
However, to my knowledge, there is no federal law that an employer is required to reimburse you for any of your travel-related expenses. (Which is, in itself, ridiculous.)
You could always take them to court (even small claims court) or just outright get debt collectors involved.
Probably better once you've quit though. ;)
Good incentive structures are hard.
Putting your trust in people is a great incentive structure.
It seems like there is a misunderstanding of who is on the taking and receiving end of risks
The story here is about how booking.com is screwing over hotels and hostels, not guests. Someone should create a different thread for that, because apparently people have a very strong need to tell their tangentially related stories.
1 - https://www.computable.nl/artikel/nieuws/development/6777910... (
A Booking.com market manager in south-east Asia admitted at a recent industry event that payment delays were caused by the installation of a new payment system. Staff salaries were also affected, she said, explaining it as a risk they had to take.
From an earlier article:
In the company’s August results, CFO David Goulden said there were "lower than expected" IT expenses in the second quarter of this year, in part due to phasing IT spend into the third quarter, but did not outline what this IT expense included.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/03/bookingcom-...
Is this all just a fancy way of saying, "They 'restructured' IT and payment problems resulted?"
On the other hand I consider Airbnb to be a scam enabling company that does everything to screw the customer and appease the hosts. Their reviews are worthless as they remove mentions of problems regularly and you will never know what you're getting until you arrive at the location. Forget about getting your money back if the host screws you as well - they will string you along from one support call to another and then pretend none of this happened.
It's no surprise shady hosts prefer Airbnb to booking as it's easier to keep your trap offerings online for longer.
I finally wised up. Hotels basically hate guests who book with a service like Booking.com and they will not lift a finger to help you if anything goes wrong.
Now I use Booking.com, Kayak, etc to find hotels in the general area I need, then use google or DDG to find the website of the hotel (a process much easier said than done because the booking sites SEO the hell out of search engine results), then book directly with the hotel or its parent chain.
Edit: been typing markdown all day, oops.
It started with airlines, but eventually included everything from hotels to rental cars.
The space is more or less dominated by a few big players. Sabre. Amadeus. Travelport.
GDS is the backbone of all of these booking platforms as far as I'm aware.
The hotel did not give a rats ass about how happy I was, if I wanted to come back, and were not accountable. They basically gaslit me. The person pretended I was crazy or stealing, and I would surely have proof otherwise.
In most systems, you get some kind of ticket notification. I really felt I would be better with any portal system. I know booking can be shitty too, but dealing with hotels individually just seems worse to me.
By the way, they finally only charged me for one day. Chargeback rejected. Assume all of your chargebacks will be rejected if you don't have evidence. They WILL side against you, in favor of a large hotel at least (I don't think they were a chain either).
In Dominican Republic I was told to just use an online booking site as it was much cheaper than doing it in person. Their own site was also more expensive than expedia.
When I last did this, for a vacation, the cost at an aggregator was less if there was no cancellation allowed, and more if the option to cancel was added (but to a couple days before I believe), and needed to be paid at time of booking. When I called, I got a rate slightly less than the online+cancellation, I was able to cancel up to 24 hours in advance, and I only needed to pay on arrival, meaning I didn't tie up a few thousand for a few months.
There's also always the option to state the rate you found online and see if they are willing to match it. It's not like there usually some magic involved, if they're willing to offer it to an aggregator, why wouldn't they at least consider offering it to you direct?
As I said elsewhere, the hotel's support can be even worse, and amount to them basically robbing you.