The issue is that it creates an incentive to maximize the cost of travel as the employee directly get miles based on the price.

I see this all the time with employees/managers booking a 1000$ flight that will give them 10k miles instead of a perfectly fine 400$ flight that would only give them 4k miles.

I travel quite a bit for work, e.g. the last 30 days I've been home for 4 while travelling to 6 cities spread over 4 countries and 5 time zones, and that's not how I understood what they are saying at all. If you want a perk for travelling, these points based systems are the most Kafkaesque way imaginable to give so little for it.

And often it is like they are stealing from the company. I remember seeing on LinkedIn a ${seniorExec} of a place I worked at posting how they are a million miler first class traveler on airline X but they'll be switching to airline Y exclusively from now on because X's point system isn't as good anymore. The moral of the post was supposed to be something about treating your customers right for loyalty or something, what I took away from it is this person is throwing away my entire trip travel budget on individual flights because they are selecting how to get the best kickback. Meanwhile I'm trying to get approval to chop 4 hours off what should be an 8 hour door to door flight by spending $120 more than the recommended flight to avoid an extra hop and layover because that just makes no $ sense from a hours perspective.

The best perk I ever got for travel was an actual pay increase for it, many times larger than any hotel or flights points program has ever been worth to me. If you want to give your travelling employees a perk then that is a real way to do it, not a few brand specific dollars for each part of the trip you have to sign up for.

So customer travels to vendor's site?