Road warriors: how are you compensated for your travel?

I need some guidance from the other road warriors here in the hive.

I'm a Project Manager in IT, and my role started three years ago with a projected 20% time on the road. I'm now working at about 90% of work days on the road and our project leadership is all about to change. With that leadership change, we're looking to redefine our roles, job descriptions, and I'm going to be very vocal about the compensation portion too. I won't go into all the details here, but suffice to say my team has been given the bait and switch a few times now regarding being rewarded for all these days on the road and long days at sites.

So how are you compensated for days on the road? When I travel it is typically 5 days straight, living at one somewhat remote site. Travel to these sites is 8 hours each way minimum. I travel on weekends, or just make really long days. When I'm on site, I'm working for a minimum of 10 hours a day. I get at best 1.5 days home on the weekends. Sometimes none at all.

What strategies are you familiar with? Comp time? Some sort of adjusted "road rate"? My cost of living is higher when I'm on the road. I have to hire services for my home that I would do myself if I was around. My family suffers from my absence. How should I ask to be compensated for this lost time with my fam?

I have meetings with the new bosses coming up soon, and I want to be prepared to offer some solutions with evidence of success in other fields or industries.

Ouch. Situations like that are never easy. In my it area, is basically just known that 100% travel makes about 30% more salary (this is average of course, but pretty common). 

This is assuming all actual travel costs are fully reimbursed, including food, while you are on the road.

Also, many places would rather negotiate days off and work from home than higher salary. So sometimes the travelers work 4days10hours and have Fridays off. Or work from home Friday.

Unfortunately since you already work there they will not feel like there is big need to "renegotiate", they will already feel like they have negotiated benefits and travel that works for you. Another angle: you are basically living a consultant job life. Are you being paid at a consultant rate?

My boss empowers me to decline site visits starting on Monday or running past mid-day on Friday so I’m only traveling during working hours. Additionally, I don’t have to inconvenience myself to get the lowest fare.

There are still some issues in terms of spending family time packing and stuff but I’m salary so it’s expected that I “get the job done” rather than clock in-out. Besides, I get to keep all the rental car, hotel, & airline miles which cover several nice family vacations per year.

Basically, I’m happy with the arrangement and I think I’m treated fairly.

I have to shop for flights/cars/hotels wisely, but they are very accommodating, so it's NEVER been an issue. If I travel on a weekend day, I get a comp day.  If I get home past midnight, i can stay home till noon the next day.   

All expenses are covered, meal per diem is generous. 

If I have to work more than 8 hours  a day, it's handled in a case-by-case basis. That doesn't happen too often. 

WHOA!!!!  You are getting paid for about 1/2 of the time that you are working.  Is that acceptable to you in any way?!?!?  

This is a huge pet peeve for me. First, travel on the weekends is not acceptable.  You salary covers working Mon - Fri, so fly in on Monday on the company's dime and back Friday afternoon.  Yes, you are getting paid to sit on an airplane: there is a cost of doing business and your employer needs to accept that.  

If you need to be on-site on a weekend or early Monday morning, that is taking you away from your family and your responsibilities (cutting he grass etc) so there needs to be compensation.  If you were in sales, then the compensation would be landing contracts and getting larger commissions or bonuses.  If you are in a support role however, it needs to be overtime, or being off Friday when you get home. Now, I am not talking about the occasional weekend or late night, that is part of being a salaried employee.  But if it becomes a regular thing, then something has to change.  

In your situation, you agreed to 20% travel but are actually seeing 90%...that is a HUGE change in your contract.  They changed the terms, so they also need to change the compensation.  When you agreed to 20% travel at a particular salary, you could cover things like cutting the grass.  With 90% travel, things change...a lot.  You need to be getting paid more, no question.  They also need to accept that you may need to fly at higher rates to get home in time for birthdays and dance recitals. If they want you to put in overtime regularly for free, then they need to be willing to support your family schedule as well. If they are unwilling, go somewhere else.  

The cost of having people on the road also covers hotels and meals. I am fine with spending guidelines to control costs, but too often companies want their employees to be in the road but are unwilling to be realistic about what that entails.  $75 cap for a hotel room?  In Manhattan?  Get serious!  You need a safe place to spend the night. You also need to eat, not at Ruth's Chris, but not at 7-11 either.  If they are not willing to pay for it, work elsewhere.  

I have had younger employees who liked to travel.  With no family or house to worry about, they were fine with being road warriors. But at some point, it gets old and you begin to travel because the company needs you to.  Ask for a higher salary to compensate for the extra travel, or get paid hourly with overtime for every hour that you are on the road.  

Very interesting to see people’s perspectives here.  

I find those that push points such as those above limit their upward mobility.  Asking for extra comp is fine and should be something you do on a regular basis, but being a pain won’t get you anywhere. 

When I was working on the road, I was paid per diem in addition to me regular salary.  However, my situation was different and I was in one location for 10 months, so I rented an apartment and went home every 3-4 weeks.  The per diem amount for a month was about 3x the cost of the apartment, so I came out of the deal quite a bit ahead of the game.  That softened the blow of being away from friends and family for so long.   If I have the opportunity to do that again, I would try to do the "van-life" thing and skip the apartment costs.

Otherwise, I would say it really depends on what your hiring agreement was as well as Robbie's comment about your pay scale. When our IT guys travel to remote offices they generally make up for the travel by working a somewhat reduced work day. However, rarely does their travel require overnight stays. 

I don't travel much, but the amount is increasing. I'll probably get 5-7 weeks total time on the road this year, but most of those are 3 or 4 day runs that require flights on a preceding weekend. We're a small company, so they are pretty flexible about flight scheduling, and I live on a company CC while traveling. They are pretty generous with what they're willing to cover on that card, and I can entertain on it if it's business. I don't get any formal comp time or pay bump, but my supervisor kind of lets me take time informally.

Renegotiations are always the hardest way to gain ground.

I use to travel a lot but I was making about 35% more when I was. Now I'm only traveling 2-3 times a quarter at most and I'm getting paid less. IF I take this job which looks like it's going to come up, I'll be back to earning that 35-40% more and traveling every other week. So I've always done it on salary. 

If the job isn't as advertised, you really have 2 choices. 

1. Work with your boss to make it something better 

2. Find a different job. 

In your situation, It sounds like a perfect time to do number 1 with a new leadership. Walk in there with a clean list of what you want and what isn't working today. Make it conversational and not whiny.  Sometimes, even after doing #1, things don't change so don't be afraid of looking for a new gig. 

I traveled a lot for sales.  The extra sales might have gotten me a bonus if the company did well.   Most sales guys get a credit card and ding the company hard for dinners and don’t skimp on hotel rooms or rental cars. 

Ive seen six guys rack up $1800 dinners if an important customer is with them. 

The balance of the crap goes with the territory- do it or move on.  

I don't travel as much as you, but I do travel at least a few days every month. I am not salaried, I get paid by the hour and I don't get to charge travel time unless I am actually doing work. So, I mke sure to have something to do while on a plane for 3 hours and during layovers. I get reimbursed for all travel expenses including miles driven to/from the airport. I don't any type of shift differential if I have to work night shifts when on site nor do I get anything additional added to my hourly rate for OT hours.

I as a general rule do not travel on the weekends. I do put in as many hours as I can when I am onsite and then sort of create my own comp time by working a half day on Friday or something like that.

We were considered "Salary non-exempt".  We were given a salary and that's what we got for the normal 8-hour day, for 40 hours of work a week, we were paid for travel time (from site A to B, always in a different state) IF we went immediately in to work (and we often found reasons.  Base passes, set our computers up on the network, etc). 

Any time beyond our normal, salaried, work week or normal working hours we were offered the choice of flex time (take an equivalent amount of hours off within the same pay period), or a pay rate at time-and-a-half our normal rate as compensation.  Double-time on sundays, holidays, when we worked more than 12 hours straight, or when we accumulated more than 12 hours of overtime within the same pay period.

While on the road we charged everything to the company credit card.  There were company preferred places to stay (think "Marriott" or the equivalent) and a cap to how much we can spend a night on the rooms that usually afforded us good locations.  Food was paid for up to the government per diem rate for the area.  Flights were paid for, and we were usually allowed a rental car per every three people.  If we had to drive our POV from A to B beyond a certain amount of miles (100, maybe?) we were paid by the mile.  If we were gone for more than 30-days straight then the company paid for our dependents to fly out to visit (For some reason most of our trips lasted 28 days maximum).

With all that in mind I didn't mind traveling about 50% of the time (company estimated 30% travel time) and the extra income I made paid for the extra child care costs etc that incurred due to my absence (with a little extra take home so we could do more things together to make up for time lost).  I would not be ok traveling as much as you do on any sort of regular basis even with the above compensation unless there was a means to the end that greatly benefited me.

Most importantly:  Have you compared your working hours and compensation to state law? 

 

Thanks so much for all the great advice! Here's some more details of my situation if you're curious:

Current Travel Policies:

• Flights are booked through corporate travel agent, but I have full freedom to choose my flights and times - sometimes this means expensive flights. Company pays for tickets.
• All other travel expenses are paid by me, reimbursed within about two weeks of submitting my expense report with receipts via snail mail. This blows, hard. I float $50k+ of travel expenses in a year, which isn't easy on my salary.
• No per-diem limit, but I live very inexpensively on the road. I don't eat out because I'm trying not to get fat, but I do expense a yoga class most nights. Probably $160/week per diem on average.
• Lodging: hotel for shorter site visits, AirBnB for longer. I've booked 2 months at a little apartment here in the BC interior for my current site. It's waaaayyyy cheaper at ~$55/night compared to the ~$120 I'd pay at a hotel. 

The Project:

We're putting in a new ERP system and since our company never had much of a consistent business process, that's the bigger part of our work. Standardizing business processes and training the people to do them. I lead the industrial maintenance, inventory, and stores functions of the project - my newly retired counterpart lead the other part which was accounting, AP, and finance. Our team is tiny because our company and industry is dumb and thinks we're smarter than everyone else. We're not. So we implemented a pilot site to "prove it" and then basically got stuffed into getting two more sites up and running. Hence the herculean effort with excessive travel and long days. Also the reason for our bitterness - no compensation for getting this project off the ground. No reward. Nothing.

Renegotiation:

I completely agree that renegotiating rates is rarely an effective arrangement. In my circumstance, I'm one of four team members that has been carrying a very large, highly visible project. One just retired, and another is going to in a few months. That leaves me and one other, so we're holding some pretty good cards from that perspective. New management verbally acknowledges that project structure has to change and the current "small team of heroes" approach is not sustainable in the long run. They've asked for our help in recasting the project, as well as establishing some reasonable roles.

I'm on the road a lot - usually up to 5 days/week, but I make a point of not traveling on weekends unless it's absolutely necessary. Most of the time, it isn't.

Very similar setup to yours inasmuch as I have to book flights, rental cars and non-AirBNB accommodation through the company's appointed travel agent. AirBNB I obviously book directly. Company reimburses me within 1-2 weeks, but we use a fully online expense reporting service via an external provider (Expensify, no connection other than using them). That alone is worth its weight in gold over submitting paper receipts. I would recommend you at least suggest using a service like this to you rmanagement - it made that a less painful experience for everybody involved.

I use my own credit card to float these expenses, but it's one that I almost exclusively use for business use - it also provides a couple of useful travel perks. Pretty much every company I worked for in the US so far seems to require people to use their own credit cards or offer massively caveated company cards that I declined.

In my case, I work for a company with one of those "unlimited PTO" (as long as your boss, his boss and the universe agrees) type deals so I don't get additional comp days if I do have to travel or work on weekends. I am, however, encouraged to make use of my PTO.

Unfortunately similar deal re the addition re added work for no added reward. Words of wisdom from one of my career gurus when I asked him for advice on this was twofold - check what is considered normal in your business area for compensation in cases like this, and do not forget that you are not trapped there.

I do on average 10 to 25 trips per year.  This year will be on the high end of that,  but my trips are limited to 2-3 nights per week,  with a few exceptions like international travel,  and no weekends.  I book my own travel , pick non stop flights as much as possible and stay at nice hotels.  One way they compensate us is by making our schedule while IN the office very flexible.  When I’m not traveling I generally work from home Mondays and Fridays,  then work 9-4 on the days I do come in.  I would prefer not to travel so much,  but with the current setup I’m not going to complain too much.

Just FYI when I first started I travelled Sunday-Friday because I thought that was the norm since the person I cross trained with did that.  Apparently he just didn’t want to be home!  When I questioned it they were very flexible,  so if you don’t like your current schedule I’d start there.

My ex-wife is a travel warrior. 

She was salaried, Flights and all travel paid, per diem, + $100 month cell phone allowance, $500 personal car allowance (even though most of the time that was just used for her drive to and from the airport). She would occasionally drive it if she was visiting clients in state, or close enough to not bother with air travel. 

And for those times was reimbursed per mile + lodging/food/etc.