Bringin' back the gripe...
My employer just inacted a new travel policy. It used to be that any expense under $25 I did not need to keep a receipt for. Now, I need a receipt for EVERYTHING that I expense off. That includes those times when I have no time to stop and get a meal at an airport (or it is late and the food places are closed) and I get a drink and snack out of a vending machine... Oh wait, no receipt there, so no reimbursement. Or when I am driving and have a toll. Now I have to hope for a toll booth that actually has a person and have to ask for a receipt every time, even for a $1.00 toll. Nevermind those on/off ramp ones that aren't staffed.
I know that this may seem petty to some, to worry about $1.00 here or $7.00 there (soda and bag of chips at some airports), but when I am traveling because of work, it shouldn't cost me money to be there when work is requiring it.
Now I *DO* understand that I am sure that some people were scamming the system or taking advantage of it by eating a dollar burger or something for lunch and expensing off a $24 meal instead, but for the honest people, this sucks. I know that every trip will end with at least a few bucks in expenses without receipts and thus it will cost me to travel when my work requires it.
For those of you that think that I still get the benefit of eating out, or going to a movie (which costs me anyway), I would much rather be at home for those evenings. I also am losing a lot of the travel benefit programs. It will take a year to get back into Enterprise GOLD level after I spent all of last year working to Avis FIRST level per their request. Make up your mind on who I should be renting with.
Not to mention that they will no longer pay for my Delta AmEx annual fee. They used to pay the annual fee since I could then check my luggage for free (2 of my trips covered the annual fee, so it saved them money), but now they won't do that. The benefit from this was that every year I received a free companion ticket that we used and saved us $500+ per vacation. I also will no longer be able to book that companion ticket if I pay for the annual fee myself as I always tie a vacation into a work trip so that my flight was paid for by work (as long as it was the same of cheaper for them) and then I used that for booking the companion ticket for my wife. I was allowed to do that by booking on Delta.com (a requirement for when using a companion ticket) and attaching a copy of the purchase information. Now, everything MUST go through the company travel site, no exceptions. I also am wondering how this will impact my SkyMiles membership since Delta is now tracking miles and dollars spent. The miles will be there, but how they track or IF they allow the dollars from a 3rd party booking site to count will be a big question.
So I am losing pretty much all benefits of traveling for work minus some of the base level mileage, and it is actually going to cost me money to travel for work each year...
THAT, folks, has been my daily gripe.
