A Financial Flight Fiasco

I worked in Africa as an operations manager for a large global security company from 2009 to 2014.

The country I was working in had been through a long civil war and was very underdeveloped — think no paved roads, and people living a very traditional African lifestyle. At the time, I’d been working there on a rotation of ten weeks in the country and two weeks at home for about four years.

I’d flown to and from work so often that I had the journey down to the bare-minimum travel time, and it worked out as the cheapest option for the company because travel days were paid from when I left home. The shorter my journey was, the cheaper it worked out for the company.

Someone in the head office looked at cutting down on travel costs, probably to make themselves look good and get promoted. As a result, I got an email after a week at home saying they had changed my normal flight, which was at 5:00 pm on Sunday from my nearest UK airport, via Amsterdam, then on to Nairobi, Kenya, connecting with a 9:00 am flight to [Country] on Monday morning. The change was from a 5:00 pm departure to a 5:00 am departure the same day, using the same route and saving about £80.

To clarify, the 9:00 am flight from Nairobi was the first flight to [Country] because the destination airport was the only surfaced runway in the country. It had no runway lights or radar, so all flights had to be in daylight.

I agreed to the flight time change, but they had to move it to Monday so I wouldn’t lose a day at home. They agreed because they still saved £80 on the ticket — no skin off their nose.

Once I got the flight confirmation, I contacted the travel desk asking for hotel and taxi bookings. When they asked why I needed these, I explained that a 5:00 am departure required a check-in at 3:00 am, so I needed a hotel at the airport on Sunday night because no trains were running to get me the three hours to the airport from home at that time of the morning.

The flights they booked would get me into Nairobi at 7:00 pm — after dark — so I’d need a hotel there and a taxi each way to and from the hotel to get me onto the 9:00 am flight on Tuesday — the same flight I would have been on if I’d left at 5:00 pm but a day later.

A couple of days went by, and I got a phone call from the company travel desk telling me the travel plan was confirmed. I was on the 5:00 am flight with a hotel reservation at my UK airport the night before and a hotel in Nairobi after landing, and the taxi would collect me in Nairobi and drop me at the airport for my final connection.

I asked about the cost savings and they said it was £80. I then asked about the hotels and taxis. They replied, “Oh, they don’t come out of our budget; that’s the operations budget, so you’re fine.”

I was happy. I was arriving back at work a day later, still paid the same amount, with a night out in Nairobi to sweeten the deal.

My boss, on the other hand, went nuts! Nobody had told him about the changes. My deputy flew out on the plane I flew in on, meaning I didn’t get a handover of the work that was going on. On top of that, the cost of hotels, taxis, and an extra day’s pay had all come out of my boss’s operational budget.

I think the total amount added was almost £1,000, but hey, they saved £80 on the flight cost!