What policies do you think are fairest (both to the business and to
the employees) to cover employees who want to combine business travel
with vacations (i.e., bring family along, take extra days)? Thank you.

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Request for Question Clarification by mvguy-ga on 15 Nov 2006 06:20 PST

Are you looking for a personal opinion, or something based on
research? I'd be happy to provide you with my personal opinion, but I
don't know why it would be more valid than yours or anyone else's.
Thanks.

Here in Germany, where employee councils exist in many firms  -
representatives elected by the employees -  some of them have decided
that combining business with personal travel is unfair, since it is a
practice that only certain employees can take advantage of, regardless
of whether the practice is handle in a way that avoids any additional
cost to the company, or whether the employee pays for his/her own
transportation, as s/he still has the convenience of traveling on
company time.

That is rather strict, but logical and impeccably fair.

At my company, when you mix business travel with personal, you have to
show what the trip would have cost if you had done no personal part of
it and then anything on top of that is your responsibility.  This
means no additional expense to the company, while the employee can get
a benefit of a plane ticket at no personal cost.  Also, if you stay
with friends or family while you are on company business (thus saving
the company the cost of a hotel), you are allowed to take out your
hosts to dinner and charge that cost to the company.

From my experience it is eminently sensible taking the lass along.

Business travel can be very boring.

Mayoarin, 

If you're mentioning Germany, a quite prominent politician in Germany
resigned from his post a couple of years ago because it has been
claimed that he has used the bonus miles for private usage. The trips
themselves were business "clean", no doubt here, but the usage of
bonus miles was viewed as corruption.

Poli-guru,
Quite so, another aspect that has also been a subject for private
employers and has been decided by a case taken to the highest court
for labor disputes, the Bundesarbeitsgericht.  Here, a German text
link:
http://www.hensche.de/Arbeitsrecht_aktuell_BAG_Bonusmeilen_11_04_2006_9AZR500_05.html

The court judged that the employee could not use bunus miles for
private trips but must apply them to business travel for the firm.

Try following the approach used by the U.S. tax code.