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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

I suppose many of us are lucky to work in high-margin software businesses. I spent 15 years often travelling for work (typically very distributed companies) before the pandemic. Four separate companies. Everything paid on my personal CC. I preferred it that way so that I could optimize the flights/etc to make it fit my personal life. Everything reimbursed swiftly with zero questions since I never did anything really stupid. The only real bottleneck was myself; filing all of those damned receipts for every trip.

Having some kind of centralized travel booking service that "took care of everything" would likely have caused me to find another job. For one company I did a monthly 6h travel + a few days of hotel + 6h travel thing for a decade. Not being in total control over that would simply not have been feasible.

I have no idea how people doing a large amount of travel for stereotypical low-margin large companies manage to get by.

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> Having some kind of centralized travel booking service that "took care of everything" would likely have caused me to find another job

Having worked at both kinds of companies, I vastly preferred having a travel agent that took care of everything.

For example: one time I had a later flight with a layover. The initial flight was delayed on the tarmac before takeoff, and immediately upon landing, a person called me telling me there were no more flights that evening to my final destination, but they'd already booked me a hotel near the airport and the first flight out in the morning to my final destination, and asked me if I'd like any modifications. Perhaps someone else who wants more control would like to handle that stuff themselves, but for me, it was a massive luxury to have an experienced professional automatically smooth over any problem I encountered during my travel. I certainly didn't miss keeping all my crumpled receipts and submitting expense reports either.

Yeah, that kind of service would have been awesome.

A great example of self-service actually making things worse for people. There are many, many more of those, and it leads me to believe that software's transformation of the economy isn't as positive on the net as people seem to believe.

Perhaps that’s one reason the economic productivity numbers haven’t moved as much as one might expect.

In theory, having a third party would be nice. In my experience, it's merely added substantial friction to the process. Any changes required going back through the third party, which means waiting to talk to someone for changes that I could normally do online.

> high-margin software businesses.

I've heard similar stories to this from people working at high-margin software businesses before too.

It could be something along the lines of "depends which team you're in", as to who's being screwed over or not.

That's a great sign your company actually sucks and you should quit. Probably likely: It wasn't actually a high-margin company.

> Probably likely: It wasn't actually a high-margin company.

Definitely was. Bad HR people can exist anywhere. :/

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