If you have to travel for business, you’re probably pretty familiar with submitting expense reports.

What would you do if you submitted your expense report and a small and reasonable expense was denied? Would you let it go, or would you get payback on the company until they changed the policy?

The man in today’s story liked to save time and money by traveling through the small, local airport, but when his expense report was denied, he decided it was time to do things differently.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

I’m not allowed to take Ubers unless it’s to the main airport? Fine.

In Toronto there’s a small island airport close to downtown and then the full on Pearson International.

Once every 2 weeks or so I’d have to travel so I’d usually book my flight through the island airport since it would be cheaper and my office was downtown so it took literally 15 mins to get to (and there’s no real customs or anything, you can show up 30 mins before your flight depart time and be good to go).

If my flight was at 1pm I’d leave the office at noon and make it with time to spare.

Here’s the problem…

One day I get my expense request denied for the Uber that took me to the airport because “it was close enough to walk and as per company policy taxi/Uber is only for Pearson”.

This was all over $12 which I was doing for months. Ok, fine.

Next flight I booked in Pearson.

Time to play by the rules no matter what it costs!

The ticket was $900 instead of $400, I paid $70 in an Uber to get there instead of $12, and I had to leave work a full 3.5 hours before my flight to make it through check in, security, etc to get to my gate in time.

Usually I’d be on some sort of call leading up to my flight but here I couldn’t do any work at all.

Sorry team, I’m unavailable for the rest of the day because of company policy.

The company was surprised the trip cost more than usual.

Come back and I’m asked why my expense report was double the usual amount I’d put in.

It’s because I can’t expense a $12 uber to Billy Bishop airport and I’m not going to walk for 40 minutes in my suit and dress shoes in the middle of January in the snow.

2 months later it’s now cost them $2000+ over what I’d normally have spent.

Some of the flights in that time were over $1000 vs the $400 at the Island Airport.

Now there’s a new policy.

Finally I get an email one day saying I can take whichever flights I deem best based on my judgement and that any amount under $700 is auto approved at the Island Airport.

Now I get to eat a nice meal and sometimes upgrade myself to premium seats and still fall within budget!

Bring on the premium seats! That sounds like a great success story!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person loves the way the story worked out.

Telling an employee to walk to the airport is ridiculous.

This is funny!

Yeah, I’d like to see the person who make that policy walk to the airport!

It does seem pretty ridiculous!

Forty minutes is not walking distance.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.