wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (06/03/85)
In article <3775@alice.UUCP> ark@alice.UUCP (Andrew Koenig) writes: >If I owned a company, I would take the view that an employee >who wishes to get from point A to point B for business purposes >can go whichever way is most convenient, with the understanding that >the risk for all forms of travel is on the employee. This is similar >to the arrangement that currently exists at AT&T Bell Laboratories >for people who want to use their own cars for business travel: I wonder if that principle applies at AT&T Bell Labs for company- provided AIRLINE tickets, though -- I know it does NOT for US Gov't agency/activity travel offices, and I would think that most large organizations would have travel regulations that tended to be somewhat similar. Here, the convenience of the traveller has absolutely NOTHING to do with the flights or classes of service selected. Flights are selected and travellers assigned to take them based on long-term contracts with airlines, if the flights are for frequently-travelled routes (like from the local office to Washington DC, probably the most common route for most activities outside the DC area). This means usually that the travel offices cannot take advantage of short-term price reductions (like special saver fares), but the overall average cost for all flights is better than just buying them at "retail". This situation can have great ill-effects on travellers, though. For example, for quite a while, our contract here in St. Louis for flights to major West Coast destinations (SF and LA) was with Northwest Airlines. This forced us to take a feeder flight from St. Louis to Minneapolis and then connect with wide-body flights from there to SF or LA, which stopped there on their way to Hawaii. These feeder flights and the Minneapolis-West Coast legs were usually not very full, which meant that Northwest could underbid for this particular route and still make good money on seats that would otherwise go empty. So, the fare was less to the activity, which could care less how abused the travellers were, with extra take-offs and landings exposing them to higher risk factors, delays in the initial flights causing missed connections and subsequent hours spent in the Minneapolis terminal, and simply many more hours spent cramped in airplanes. If this sort of thing does NOT occur in any large organization, to personnel low enough on the totem pole to have no control over the travel people or choose their own arrangements, I'd be surprised. (Even if the local travel offices tried to take traveller's needs into account, they were hamstrung by the fact that these contracts were made by GSA, on a regional basis, and regulations forced the travel people to assign travellers to use them.) Will Martin USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA
medin@noscvax.UUCP (Ted Medin) (06/11/85)
Well I am glad you dont run a company I work for. Air carriers safer? Well I guess a little bit. In this age of deregulation there is a good chance they may not be going where your going or when your going. I love to fly from San Diego to LA and watch all that bumper to bumper trafic with all the frustration etc. Probably one thing that should be required is a current instrument rating.