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Corporate travel rules sound efficient until someone removes a practical option and replaces it with something far more expensive.

One consultant loses his rental car and gets only two cab rides daily, so when management insists, would you complain or find another approved route?

With those limits exhausted, he discovers a wonderfully literal transportation option hiding inside the company’s fully covered mailing policy.

See how one consultant turned business travel into a very special delivery.

Special Delivery

It was the mid 90s.

My father was a highly paid business consultant.

The company he worked for would hire him out to businesses who were trying to get off the ground.

He would fly out, spend a few weeks with them, and train their management the finer points of business ownership.

He also handled large projects, such as the planning, building, staffing, and organization of new offices, and other such.

He must have been good at his job.

For this, his company would charge anywhere from $300-$400 an hour for his time, billed by the week at a minimum of 40 hours a week (or more if there was overtime).

In exchange for this less than modest sum, the company took care of all of my father’s expenses, rather than push them off on the client.

This went on for years.

My mom quit her job to stay at home with me, and my dad held down the finances of the household himself.

But he was gone for three weeks at a time, and when he was here, he was at the office.

I was lucky if I spent any real time with him more than two days a month. This also negatively affected my parents’ marriage.

That would be a really cool gift!

Then for my sixth birthday, my dad got me a model plane, and a membership card to the airline his company used.

(In truth it was a copy of his card, but 6 year old me thought it was the coolest thing ever. It had my dad’s name on it, and the word “admiral”)

Bringing his concerns regarding his homelife to his boss, my father had struck a deal. I would be flown out to him every third or so weekend.

My father would pay the cost of the flights, but would use his company account, and thus have access to his frequent flier discount, company discount, and would collect any loyalty points or whathaveyou that I earned.

This is a great arrangement.

I was flying for pennies on the dollar.

I would spend the weekend with him in whatever hotel we was in, and we would go and do stuff in the city.

He got to see me, I got to see both him and a new city, and mom got to spend a weekend without me to decompress.

Everyone loved the arrangement, myself especially.

Fast forward a year.

I have achieved admiral status within the airline’s loyalty program (not a hard task as my dad already had that status and I was using his account, but I felt accomplished none the less), and have been to all 48 continental States.

Promotions aren’t always a good thing.

This is when something happened.

There was a change in the company.

People moved around, people were hired, and people were fired.

And when all the dust settled, my Dad found himself one position higher, and under new management.

Dad’s new manager had no issues with the Father and Son get-away perk my dad was liberally using.

But to offset the extra cost, there would be a few changes to my Dad’s expense account.

While food and entertainment were fully covered (as many of his meetings happened over lunch), the manager decided that rather than provide my father with a rental car, instead he would take local transport, via cabs or similar services, and would be given a limited number of trips he could take a day.

This is pretty reasonable.

Surely he only needed to travel twice a day, (to and from the site) so he was alloted two cab rides per day he was out of state (including weekends since the manager wanted to be generous).

Any additional travel my father wanted to take would be on his own dime.

My dad brought up that the company was not spending any resources on my trips, aside from the 30 minutes of time it tooks the travel agent to book my flights.

But this new manager insisted that this was a much better use of company time and resources.

All other expenses, including the hotel, dry cleaning, and any mail that had to be sent, would be covered as usual.

Now… normally my visiting weekends would be jam packed with whatever local museum or attraction the city had, followed by a nice dinner at a cool or fancy resturant.

One does not achive this with two cab rides a day.

I bet this was an incredible day.

My dad blows all his cab rides on my next visit. We go and see everything.

A museum, a movie, and a fair of some sort. Every trip was by cab.

This is the part I remember, because my dad had me keep count with him. An entire amazing day is spent and in total, 11 cab rides were had.

Now for the malicious compliance.

Without any more alloted cab rides, after I was sent home, my dad was still schedualed for a week of work.

He contacted the local postoffice and explained his situation.

After some evil laughter from both him and the postman, a truck shows up at his hotel.

This is too funny.

He “mails” himself to work and then back again for the rest of the week.

He pays for first class delivery by the pound.

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This becomes exorbitantly expensive.

At the end of the trip my dad sent in an expense report that had a few thousand dollars extra on it, for “shipping” costs.

The fallout:

Some stuff happened. There was a change in the company.

Some people were moved, some people were hired, and some people were fired.

My father found himself under a new manager.

The company decided that it was improper to have different rules for expenses for different employees based on their status or tenure.

A fixed policy was enacted company wide.

My dad’s new manager had no issues with sending me out once a month on my fathers business account…

As long as my father paid for the cost of the flights.

That is great that they put things back the way they were, which worked out well for everyone.

Read on to see what the people in the comments thought of this.

Dad really made things work. He must have been great at his job.

Maybe he meant 2-3 years later?

I’m sure he was just exaggerating.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a contractor who flew along way and spent 3 days on a fix only to find a breaker that needed to be flipped.

This commenter loves the deal this kid got.

The new manager replaced a rental car with two daily cab rides, even though the consultant’s work and family visits required far more flexibility.

After absolutely burning through the cab allowance, he paid the post office to transport him and submitted the enormous shipping bill as an expense.

Management eventually standardized the expense policy, while the manager behind the restriction was replaced and the family travel arrangement continued.

He lost the rental car, but somehow upgraded himself to first-class human freight.

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Author

Chris Allen