Visual Guilt & Evils of Corporate Travel Policies

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described the phenomenon of "Visual Guilt". This is where business travelers select the lower fares when they see all the options themselves. (Read more about it here, registration & $$ required).

I book my travel myself, and I agree that the effect certainly works on me. I don't necessarily book the cheapest hotels, but I am careful about how much of a premium I will pay for a nicer hotel. I think it's worth my employer (or client) money to spend $20 for a good gym or a closer location, after all, they're paying for my time, but not $100 a night extra for a nice brand name.

One area where I do think it's worth consisently paying more is on nonstop flights. You can save 2-3 hours - and that's time that is valuable. Valuable to employees and valuable to employers. Sadly, many online travel systems don't assign any value to employee time. Instead, you're encouraged to take long lay-oversaw and extra stops.

To fix this, I think these travel systems should employ a formula that puts a value on employee time. Say $50/hour, for example. A trip that involves 3 extra hours of travel time should cost at leads $150 less each way than the comparable nonstop.

An interesting side effect of a policy like this might be to encourage the airlines to start putting more flights back on nonstop instead of building and maintaining "mega hubs".