The Tyranny of the Expense Account

My loyal readers may recall that a couple of weeks ago, I took a trip to Cupertino for work. For the business-related parts of the trip I was able to charge meals and other costs to an expense account. That's great, right? Expense accounts are gravy, aren't they? Well... no. Sure, it's nice to be able to stay in a nice hotel and eat nice meals without paying anything out of pocket, but expense accounts often lead to stupid purchasing behavior. This stupidity ends up hurting me when I'm engaged in personal travel, which is much more frequent (for me) than business travel.

Case in point: broadband Internet access. All major airports now have Wi-Fi available, and nearly all of them charge you at least $10 to use it. [1] This is stupid. First, if you are going to be charged for Wi-Fi, then it shouldn't be more than a couple bucks. Second, providing Wi-Fi is not that expensive, so airports should strongly consider free Wi-Fi, since it builds goodwill and makes people want to use your airport. So why is Wi-Fi $10? My hypothesis is: "because of expense accounts". Most companies will let you expense Wi-Fi. $10 isn't enough to worry about, and Internet access is genuinely useful. Thus, masses of business travelers pay the $10 for Wi-Fi, since they aren't spending their own money. This screws everyone who isn't on an expense account. Get rid of expense accounts and I bet airport Wi-Fi would drop to $2 or free pretty quickly.

The same is true for Wi-Fi in hotels and (probably) coffee shops. I've stayed in $40/night hotels with free Wi-Fi, but the $150/night Marriott I was at in San Jose charged $10/day as part of their "Wired for Business" package. Oooh, "Wired for Business"... sounds like something a serious businessman needs. Better expense that. And I bet that 70% of T-Mobile HotSpot subscriptions are subsidized by expense accounts.

So, yeah, it's nice to travel on an expense account, but I'm overall I'm ambivalent on them. Purchasing behavior might be a bit more rational if companies just gave travelers a certain amount of cash per day and let them keep what they didn't spend. I'm sure that wouldn't always work well, though. So, if you get to travel on an expense account, enjoy it, but try not to screw me too much. :-)

Notes

[1] Fortunately, PIT is an exception to the rule. Wi-Fi is free there.