Can my employer make me pay for the cost of my travel booking mistake?
December 5, 2015 8:21 PM   Subscribe

This past week I was preparing for an international business trip when I realized that I had made a mistake on my visa application. I was able to re-apply and rush things through and get on the plane. If I hadn't, it would have cost $1,000-$3,000 in change and cancellation fees for flights. My boss said that, 'most places would make the employee pay that.' Is that true?

More maybe relevant details:

I work for a US-based academic institution, but we are completely grant funded. I don't see anything in our travel policy about this.

It was my mistake. Actually, it was a series of mistakes - I forgot until the last minute, put in an application, realized that I had made a mistake on the application, and had to re-apply. There are other people who might have been able to catch the issue, but I am the one responsible for all travel arrangements.

Apparently, we are preparing for an audit, and the auditors have questioned travel change fees for personal reasons, such as charging a $300 change fee to come home early for a family event. My boss said that this was a problem for our organization.

If I hadn't gotten the visa in time for my flight, I would have had to either re-book that flight or canceled the whole trip. There were other internal flights and trains that would have had to be canceled, probably with limited to no refunds. Postponing my flight would probably have incurred around $1,000 in damage, cancelling around $3,000. Some of these, I had already paid out of pocket and would be reimbursed for; some of them, the organization had paid for directly.

I know people who have booked tickets to the wrong city, hotels in the wrong place, gotten their dates wrong, showed up places without visas - every possible travel mistake. I don't know any that had to pay for them out of pocket. But maybe I just didn't know about that part.

Is it normal to ask employees to pay for these costs? As a bonus question, should the organization reimburse me for the expediting fees that I paid to get the visa on time?
posted by oryelle to Work & Money (28 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Written policies at this place?
posted by Freedomboy at 8:32 PM on December 5, 2015


I think it's relatively normal to expect that - especially, as you say, if you missed the boat on making arrangements in the lowest-cost way and put the institution in a position to lose money for no benefit.

I once had to change a flight because my conference session got booked for a time after I would have already departed. I got the third degree for it and had to show that the session had changed after I booked my ticket.

In my experience, institutional travel policies are a fluid and reactive thing. It's true that auditors look more closely at travel than many other spending categories, because it's also true that people use their travel budgets in ways that aren't wholly work-related. The burden of documentation for travel budgets is often higher. So, while I appreciate that it's all a pain, they are right that it's within their purview to designate what they will and won't pay for, and sometimes those judgments are after the fact, simply because not everything employees try to do with their travel budgets is predictable.
posted by Miko at 8:41 PM on December 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Response by poster: Written policies at this place?

Yes, but this is not explicitly covered. I can ask for this to be clarified in the future, but I'm interesting in hearing about other people's experiences.
posted by oryelle at 8:42 PM on December 5, 2015


I suspect things get a lot more complicated when you're grant-funded from an external source, but when I worked at a private company that made products for wholesale/retail sale and we had an office in China to manage all our manufacturing there, the company paid for all the many and varied problems that cropped up in the course of traveling back and forth to China as an expected part of doing business. I myself required an expedited passport because mine was going to expire 12 days short of 6 months after the date on my entry visa, and I think I was mostly only going because my boss wanted me to get a chance to go rather than any urgent need, and they still paid for all the stuff.

It's a shitty thing to say to someone, even if policies are a huge pain. If that was actually true, you should have been given the opportunity to cancel the trip, because there is no employment requirement anywhere that actually justifies you covering the cost of your own travel for work.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:43 PM on December 5, 2015 [8 favorites]


I work for a US-based academic institution and routinely fund travel on grants. If I made a mistake and needed to pay an exorbitant expedited-visa fee, I would definitely pay out of pocket. It wouldn't even occur to me to ask whether I could charge that fee to the grant.
posted by escabeche at 8:44 PM on December 5, 2015 [22 favorites]


I was on the board of a nonprofit educational group and paid out of pocket for an air ticket booking error (plus the extra hotel night). The board had paid for the plane ticket and the hotel room originally. Same as escabeche, it didn't occur to me to ask the board if they'd pay for it. (And I'm 100% sure they would not have paid for my error. They would have covered a more expensive ticket originally if I'd needed it, but...)
posted by wintersweet at 8:49 PM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


No. Your boss is a jerk.
posted by Automocar at 8:52 PM on December 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


(P. S. 'most places would make the employee pay that' -- regardless of whether that's true, it comes across as some kind of passive-aggressive thing, or power play, or trolling for gratitude. It seems a bit obnoxious to me.)
posted by wintersweet at 8:54 PM on December 5, 2015 [29 favorites]


At organizations I have worked for, changing your travel plans to accommodate personal reasons like a sudden desire to be home early after your flights were already booked would be on you to pay for, but changing them for administrative reasons (like a missing visa) would be on them. Business travel comes with complications and mistakes and employers generally accept that shit happens occasionally. Those have been large corporations, though, not grant funded agencies or academia.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:56 PM on December 5, 2015 [9 favorites]


My experience in academia, especially with grant funding, is that travel is funded out of own's own pocket by default, and then you charge to the grant the specific expenses that (a) are foreseen and (b) that the grant explicitly covers. So, for example, if I plan to travel to a conference and the expenses break down like this:
flight: $1500
hotels: $1000
meals: $500
visas: $300
vaccinations: $200
doctor's bill while travelling: $100
unexpected flight change fee: $100

The total comes to $3700, and depending on the specific grant budget it comes out of, I might be able to get only flights and hotels reimbursed, so I pay $1200 and the grant pays $2500. Or I might be able to get everything except the vaccinations and flight change fee covered, so I pay $300 and the grant pays $3400. Etc.

In non-grant funded academic travel, it's more often the case in my experience that you have an annual travel budget, rather than specific items, so depending on which university, I might end up getting a $300 subsidy towards the above trip, or a $2000 subsidy, but not the whole thing.

Outside of academia, the expectation seems to be that the employer pays by default and there has to be a good reason for the employee to pay any part of their travel costs out of their own pocket. These are very different mindsets.
posted by lollusc at 8:58 PM on December 5, 2015 [9 favorites]


I suspect we will see a dramatic difference between publicly funded, publicly accountable organizations like nonprofits and some universities, and privately funded organizations like corporations. Financial constraints on public nonprofits are always stricter.
posted by Miko at 9:00 PM on December 5, 2015 [6 favorites]


This also may be influenced by local and state labor laws. Every place I've been, it was (for example) illegal to make an employee cover a till shortage or a skipped check at a restaurant. Though employers - especially at the supervisor level - are frequently unaware of what is and isn't illegal until HR and/or an attorney become involved. Subtracting money from a paycheck is particularly fraught.

Having said that, it appears to be generally legal (at least in the last state I worked in) for an employer to refuse to reimburse costs deemed inappropriate within the context of something the employer has required the employee to do. Indeed, there are IRS rules about reimbursements (if we pay for something that's not on the list, we have to consider it income.)

Payroll is a good job for people who can cope with hundreds of pages of regulatory text.
posted by SMPA at 9:19 PM on December 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


I work for a corporation with plenty of money and definitely ate the (appx $200, as I recall) cost of a travel mistake I made. I asked my manager about whether I could expense it and he said something along the lines of, "Basically, you shouldn't expense more than, like, a single mistaken booking over the course of a few years, or people start asking questions. If it were like 500+ dollars I'd tell you to charge it to the company. But for a couple hundred - I'd save your mistake for something bigger and just pay this one out of pocket." The way he said it, he'd clearly made the same kind of idiotic mistake I'd made at some point (I booked a flight a week later than the one I intended to book) and had just paid for the change himself. So the message I got was, "I'll approve the expense this time, but use your judgment, because I may not approve the expense if this happens again."

At this point I've been at the same company 6 years and never made another mistaken booking for business travel, so I guess I kind of got played. But it definitely wasn't a "sure, go ahead and expense it, no questions asked" situation, and I assure you my employer is good for a couple hundred dollars.
posted by town of cats at 9:19 PM on December 5, 2015 [6 favorites]


Hm. I think the places I have worked (corporate) for they could choose not to reimburse you if something was out of policy, but I'm not sure they could make you go and pay (i.e., deduct money from your paycheck).

If I changed a flight and incurred a fee for purely personal reasons, I would normally just pay the change fee myself. However, when I worked in a job which was 60-70% travel, then I would let the company pay those and it was explicitly okay to do so (within reason-- they wouldn't pay for me to go first class home) because the logic was that my work-life balance was so significantly impacted by the travel schedule. I suspect that in that case if I had done so regularly, then I would have received queries about it and been asked to limit the number of mistakes.

I have a situation now where I need to travel to India for business reasons, and the lead time on the visa is so long that it interferes with my personal vacation plans. Therefore, they need to pay for the expedited visa service. In this case, they will pay the extra fee with no problem since my vacation was scheduled long in advance and the lag time for the visa processing was unforeseen.

I know of one consultant who was working for a client and did not comply with the client request to book the hotel through their travel service. I don't know why he did not, as he was working at the client site for nearly five months. He was kind of a jerk, so probably he thought following rules was beneath him or something. When he submitted his expenses, which he did late (naturally), the client refused to reimburse the company since the rate he got at the hotel was something like 50% higher than their discounted rate. The consulting firm asked him to pay the bill himself (it literally ate most of the profit on the project for the team). He refused. When he refused, they reimbursed him, but then he was fired for not following the travel policy.
posted by frumiousb at 9:48 PM on December 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


I work in Australia for a large publicly listed American company. We are strongly encouraged to book refundable / fully flexible flights and hotels even if they cost more up front, because if our arrangements change the company won't reimburse us the cost of a full cancellation and rebooking; they generally will only pay the $100-300 admin or cancellation fee. This applies even if the arrangements change for a valid business reason, not just if the employee simply makes a mistake. This is a well known and well communicated policy (our travel booking tool even marks nonrefundable or inflexible options in red to highlight the danger, as it were), and applies to my American colleagues as well as us in Australia.
posted by snap, crackle and pop at 11:12 PM on December 5, 2015


Academia/grant funded aside as a small exception I'm nthing everyone who says, no your boss is a dick. Those costs are simply cost of business. I've been a full time traveller for 20 years in dozens of scenarios (junior, senior, self pay and expense, professionally booked by agent, freelance) and except for pickiness upgrades (first class on a short redeye) the company pays all. Mistakes, coming home early for family reasons etc. This boss is the same fucker who told me I shouldn't be using my cell phone for roaming calls from Australia when I got sent there against explicit corporate policy with a 9 month pregnant wife. Fuck him for saying some bullshit machismo boss upper hand power play crap.
posted by chasles at 3:05 AM on December 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


academic institution, but we are completely grant funded
seems to me this is the key here - grants have conditions and those conditions are not set by the receiving institution but the grant giving institution. Where I work we have a number of grants by various organisations and each grant has its own rules and of course add to this the national regulations / labour laws of this country on top of that. So I suggest oyu find out the rules for the grant that pays for your travel. Add to that: Apparently, we are preparing for an audit, and the auditors have questioned travel change fees for personal reasons, such as charging a $300 change fee to come home early for a family event. My boss said that this was a problem for our organization. and I think your bosses reaction is actually mild. Audits by a grant giver are horrid and especially travel expenses are always scrutinised. A grant that would accommodate those 300 would be really unusually generous in their rules - more likely they will reject the claim.

In our organisation (academic, completely grant funded) there is no way a personal mistake or desire to change a return flight etc would be covered by grant conditions. It would be a very generous gesture on part of the management to cover it as it would have to be written off as a loss.

In general one cannot compare academic insitutions funded by entirly grants to corporations or businesses, I would say.
posted by 15L06 at 3:44 AM on December 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


It's true of my company. I didn't cancel a hotel reservation in time and it was up to me to deal with it. I sorted it out and everything was fine, but as a person who travels weekly for work, it's expected that I'm going to take care of these sorts of things on my own.

In another case I got the date wrong on a reservation and I had to pay out of my own pocket to Change the plane reservation.

Basically, be more careful and be prepared to suck it up if you mess up.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 3:55 AM on December 6, 2015


Sounds like your boss is just telling you to be more careful with this kind of stuff. At the government agency where I work, we would generally cover that kind of mistake, but not if it happened multiple times or involved a series of unreasonably careless actions (or inactions) by the employee.
posted by rpfields at 4:20 AM on December 6, 2015


My understanding is that in the US , it is generally not legal for an employer to make you pay for a mistake (till shortage in retail, broken glasses waiting tables, etc). They can fire you, but not make you pay: Can my boss deduct the cost of my mistake from my paycheck?
posted by Violet Hour at 4:26 AM on December 6, 2015 [10 favorites]


This is why you should make every possible effort not to use your own personal credit cards for any work related purchasing. Academia is awful for using employee credit as an interest free float and requiring employees to gamble personal funds on possible reimbursement.
posted by srboisvert at 6:03 AM on December 6, 2015 [7 favorites]


I traveled on contract for a large multi-national company for a long time. My expense reports were heavily scrutinized. Example: Why did you buy gas twice in the same day? Because I had to drive 90 miles to the airport and fill up again to turn in the rental.

I booked all of my flights home about 2 weeks in advance. When my week was light on work, I would change flights to go home early. No one batted an eyelash.
posted by kamikazegopher at 8:13 AM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


What granting agency do the grants that covered this travel come from? Your employer likely doesn't get to decide this, the granting agencies do.
posted by nat at 4:00 PM on December 6, 2015


'most places would make the employee pay that.'

"most places" have people who book travel for you. like travel agents or admin folks. if a company asks me to do my booking myself I'll indulge them because I am nice but the moment I heard something like that I would stop using my personal credit card for i.e. hotel reservations and ask them to take care of it if they wanted me to go. in fact, I have deliberately left my credit card at home. turns out they always somehow find a solution, asking me was just the first and easiest thing to do. this particular company suddenly remembered that some employees had company co-signed cards and that nobody had thought of telling me about that.

anyway, I get the impression that your boss is a dick. be careful around someone like that, especially when it comes to paying for things upfront.
posted by krautland at 2:37 AM on December 7, 2015


"most places" have people who book travel for you.

In my 20 year career I've never worked somewhere where I had that luxury. Again, nonprofits/academia are different, even if very large organizations.
posted by Miko at 5:31 AM on December 7, 2015


At my institution, the rule is that the institution will pay the "lowest reasonable cost" for employee travel--so, only coach seats and never business class, up to three star hotels but nothing more, the shortest theoretically possible route for mileage (regardless of your actual mileage). So it is entirely possible that your situation would not be covered, because an expedited visa is not the lowest reasonable cost for a visa.

But, we also have admins who do that stuff, and all grant-funded travel comes with a boatload of restrictions and explicit requirements. So I'm not sure it would even come up.
posted by epanalepsis at 7:26 AM on December 7, 2015


My boss said that, 'most places would make the employee pay that.' Is that true?

Your retort should be 'Most places have high turnover, though, don't they?' Every academic institution that I've been at had some sort of travel dept.

Also:
If a company asks me to do my booking myself I'll indulge them because I am nice but the moment I heard something like that I would stop using my personal credit card for i.e. hotel reservations and ask them to take care of it if they wanted me to go.

Yes, I just had a partner go through this, at a grant-funded university position: lots of 'hey just put it on your card, we'll reimburse you!' and it almost took legal action to get the reimbursement. Don't use your money.
posted by eclectist at 10:02 AM on December 7, 2015


Hell no most places don't make you pay for your travel screw-ups. Where I work there is a huge amount of travel, things get screwed up all the time, the company is on the hook for dealing with it. That's just how it goes. If you happen to suck at booking your own travel, someone competent will do it for you and you're almost guaranteed to be flying in middle seats on el-crapp-o airline.
posted by foodgeek at 4:58 PM on December 7, 2015


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