simongr said:
I think a lot of these deals rely on volume rebates paid at the end of the year/quarter. A lot of professional services firms charge clients the face value of the flight and then get a rebate from the client for volume travel that is not passed on to clients. I wouldn't be surprised we had the same rebates.... still annoying that they dont put flight costs on my corporate AMex and that they go to CEO amex
Yep, we have a similar deal. Until about a year ago, the discount was applied to the ticket purchase. Now we pay full price up front and the company received a rebate on a regular basis (not sure if its monthly or quarterly). So now each cost centre gets charged the full list price and the rebate gets paid into corporate general revenue and not attributed to the business unit or cost centre incurring the original expense.
I much preferred the old method, and it was especially good when I chose to personally pay the difference between the fare type approved by the travel policy and that which I wanted to travel. That way I only had to pay up to the discounted fare. Now if I pay the difference, the company gets the discount in the form of the rebate - not me who is actually paying the difference in fare.
With the old method, I used to build the itinerary and fare to maximise the benefits of the discount. For example, we used to get a bigger discount for the QF proportion of ATW fares, so I would book the QF codeshares and flights and save the my business unit (and hence the company) several hundred dollars per trip. But now there is no direct incentive for me to do that as I will still be charged the list price for the ticket. So now I chose the routing and itinerary based on other factors rather than maximising the corporate discount.
