It’s interesting some of the things you miss about a big company when you go back for working at a small company. I came across one of those things this last week, the Travel Desk.
In SSE, any corporate travel goes through a team based at head office, who sort out flights, hotels and hire cars for you. You very rarely have to pay for anything on expenses – the hotels bill the company directly, and flights and cars you pretty well just turn up.
It’s a bit different at a small company. Our US office needed a techie to go along on a customer visit, about 100 miles from Atlanta, and on this occasion I was the person selected for the trip. A date was booked for the visit – a Thursday – and since it was their project, the US office started to make arrangements for the trip.
The first issue was when an e-mail came across saying that they were booking my return flight for the Sunday. Now if you’ve looked at airline price structures you’ll realise why – going home on Sunday meant that I was in the US over a Saturday night and it would about halve the cost of the flight, which was being paid by the US office. However it would also rack up a load of hotel expenses for the extra two nights, and I’d also not be working on the Monday, which would also cost the company money. The UK project manager scotched that idea.
The next issue was the planned routing. Our US office is in North Carolina, and the customer was paying expenses for two staff to fly from there. So the US office proposed to fly me to and from North Carolina, and then from there to Altanta, despite the fact that there are two airlines that fly direct from London to Atlanta. That idea was scotched too, and I looked up flights into Atlanta going over on the Wednesday, and back on the Friday, getting back to London by 10pm on the Friday.
Our US office then attempted to book the flights, but apparently had problems, and came back with return flights that were fine, but a seventeen hour epic journey over. At this point my UK manager got somewhat fed up, and got one of the UK staff to phone United reservations to sort out the flight going over – this he did relatively easily.
However then we had one final problem – the credit card. The ticket was booked on the company credit card in the US, and United, in common with most other airlines only allows you to book a ticket online on the condition that you can produce it at check-in. If it is booked elsewhere, the rule doesn’t apply, only direct with United. According to the revised schedule that United e-mailed, the change had resulted in us now having to show the credit card something we couldn’t do. The best suggestion we could come up with at this point was to cancel the whole lot, and rebook on my credit card, and then claim the whole thing back on expenses – however by that point there were no available seats on any flight back at all on the Friday, and the cost of the whole ticket was more than double the price we’d been quoted in the UK before the US office tried to organise it.
What I wanted to do at this point is talk to somebody at United at Heathrow to get a definitive statement as to whether they’d let me check in – not a chance – there appear to be no published numbers for United at Heathrow, or anywhere – everybody refers you to their call centre number, which is based in India, and can’t agree on the policy. We did finally get someone who went away to check the policy and claimed that we should be okay as we originally didn’t book with United. I’ve got the original e-ticket receipt which doesn’t state that I need the credit card, plus a revised booking, that isn’t an e-ticket receipt (I still need the original) which does say I need the card. On top of this I have the name of the person in United Customer Service who was adamant that I wouldn’t need the card. So it remains to see if I’ll actually manage to get to the US at all – have to keep my credit card handy just in case I suspect.
So although it was tedious and bureaucratic at times getting travel sorted at SSE, at least it wasn’t as much of a hassle as all of this!