Handling cancelled business flights

[htroshynski]

How does your company handle reimbursement for business flights that were cancelled? Specifically, in our situation, our employees book directly with the airline and not through Concur Travel or an approved travel agent. 

Our practice right now is to only reimburse the flight when the credits have been applied to another business flight. The logic behind this is once the flight is cancelled, it no longer has a business purpose, and has been reimbursed by the airline in the form of credits. Those credits are now available for the employee to use for personal use or business use. We want to avoid reimbursing the cost of a cancelled flight where all or part of the original flight is used for personal trips.

However, I understand from our employees' perspectives that they had incurred that expense on the company's behalf and now have to wait to get that money back.  However, using their personal card is their decision, as we do have Concur Travel and also have corporate cards available upon request. IMO, using your personal card has its benefits (earning points), but also carries risk (having to wait for a reimbursement).

Just curious what everyone's thoughts are on when exactly they would reimburse a cancelled flight! 

[jwestbrooks1]

hi

We strongly urge our users to use the company corporate credit cards.  (holding reimbursement until the flight actually takes place is extra incentive)  Airline travel must be booked through Concur or our travel company.  If they choose to submit an airline ticket paid for by personal card and it was a cancelled trip we reimburse them.  However when they expense a trip we need to see details. Like if a credit was used toward that ticket - the last 4 digits of which card was used to pay for the ticket. ETC.  Thankfully I only have 2 people who do this, and are very honest with their submissions! They show all the details.

I do have to say that not reimbursing until a trip takes places deters a lot of people from using personal cards for airline tickets.  I have travelers who use their corporate credit cards for the airline flights only and personal cards for the rest of their expenses. 

[KevinD]

@htroshynski my question to you is this...if a user books a business trip for one month from today and pays for it on their personal card, can they submit this expense today so they can get a reimbursement as soon as possible to make a payment on their personal card? If so, what happens if the user has been reimbursed, but then the trip gets canceled after the reimbursement has been made? The user now has a credit with that airline, correct? However, since the company paid them for the expense, don't the credits technically belong to the company and should be used for business use? 

I'm just asking since you mentioned that the credits can be used for either personal or business use. You also mentioned you don't reimburse them until the credits have been applied to another business flights. How does it work when flights are canceled? When do you reimburse your employees? At the time of travel? Wouldn't that mean that flights booked a month or so in advance on a personal card causes that expense to sit on the user's personal card? 

[Nancyagfa]

We actually have cash purchase of airline tickets red flagged and not to be submitted.  All airfare needs to be on a corp card as airfare is company paid.  We also require use of the corp booking tool so that we can see and reassign unused tickets.