Go ahead and admit it…you love malicious compliance stories…

It’s okay, we all do!

And this is a good one, folks!

Read on and check out what happened.

Keep that travel policy strict.

“Several years ago, I worked for a government contractor and traveled extensively; usually it was for meetings in godforsaken places, but sometimes it was somewhere cool or to spend time on a ship (sometimes both).

That’s a long trip!

For one such ship ride, I was to board an aircraft carrier in Japan, sail to Guam, and get a flight from the ship to the island before flying home.

If you’ve never been a non-essential passenger on an aircraft carrier, you don’t get a departure time when you’re planning your trip.

You get a departure window of several days, and you only get to know for sure the day before your flight.

So I knew a range of dates that I might arrive on Guam; the plan was to book a hotel for all four nights, and until we knew we were flying the next day, to just push the reservation back before the deadline.

Once we had the date we would move our flights home to the next day to only spend one night in a hotel.

My boss made his reservation at a Day’s Inn while we discussed this plan in his office.

He said it was the only hotel on our travel site that was within the per diem limit, so I should book soon.

Uh oh…

By the time I was at my desk, the last room was gone, and the only hotel available through our corporate travel site was a junior presidential suite at a pricey beach resort, that ran somewhere around $1,400 per night.

I looked around budget travel sites and direct booking with a few hotels, but there was a major fleet exercise happening around the island and hotels were packed; there were even rumors that they would set up tents on unused airstrips to house all the Marines coming in.

I told our travel department all of this and proposed that I book an AirBnB, with the caveat that I would have to pay for all four nights even if I only stayed for one, but that it would still be a thousand dollars cheaper than one night at the only hotel available.

My proposal was raised to the head of the travel department who wrote back rather aggressively that if I booked an AirBnB I would only be reimbursed for the night I actually stayed there, and that I would not be reimbursed at all if I booked the expensive hotel.

If you say so…

My instructions were to call our travel office when I landed and they would find whatever was available, that a room within the per diem rate would surely become available.

Fast forward to landing in Guam.

First call I made was to change to the next possible flight home, but I had missed the last one of the day, so I called the travel office.

Of course with my luck, the person who answered was new (and by new I mean she had started while I was on the ship).

She looks it up and says there are no rooms available.

I told her I was pretty sure there was one room available, and she replied “well yes but it’s way over the per diem rate.”

I explained everything and told her to ask the head of her department, that he knew the situation.

Here’s the deal…

After a long hold, she came back and said that I had a couple options.

I could search around by myself for an AirBnB that was within per diem, see if my boss would let me stay in his room on a cot, or she could book the suite and I would be reimbursed in full, so…

On my expense report I made a special note that I had no transportation expense to get to the airport in Guam because my hotel room came with a private car 😎

The only fallout was that they got very picky about my expense reports for a while.

I was a pretty by the book business traveler so it usually wasn’t an issue, but one time a hotel I booked was one cent per night over the per diem limit, so they rejected my entire expense report.

I filled out a new one (it was a terrible online system so I couldn’t just edit the old one) explaining that I would pay the excess out of pocket (in line with policy).

I also forwarded the rejection email to my boss, CCing the head of travel and asking which budget code I should charge for the half hour it took to rectify this $0.04 mistake (you don’t need to know my hourly rate to know that it cost the company substantially more than 4 cents).

He gave me his managerial budget and funny enough they stopped questioning my expenses after that.”

Let’s see what readers had to say about this.

This person shared a story.

Another individual chimed in.

This reader had a lot to say.

It pays to know the policies at work!

It’s just good business.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.