Per Diem

I apologize if this is a DB.

For those of you who travel, what are your per diem rates for: Hotel (do you have to share a room?), food and car?

Managing budgets is crazy these days, but I can't help but feel like our traveling reporters are getting screwed. Where do we stand with the rest of the business? We're in the 100K-125K circ. range.

Hotel - $55 (must share room)
Food -$35
Car - $30

 

The hotel, my boss is good with. We don't have to share rooms (well I don't, but I'm also the only female that travels, so maybe that helps).

Cars are reserved through the company, but we have some deal with Avis so we pay twice as much for a rental car as we should.

Food? We get $5 for breakfast, $8 for lunch, 17 for dinner. That's $30. And it's not per diem. If I only spend $8, I don't get to pocket the other $22.

 

Five bucks for breakfast? How many McGriddles can you eat on the road?

 

Haven't traveled with the most recent places I've worked, but when I did it was similar to IJAG. Food was something like $7 for breakfast, $10 for lunch, $20 for dinner, no alcohol on the company dime.

With hotels, my editor was also cool. He told us not to go to the most expensive place in town, but to get a respectable place. We would usually go to mid-range chain that had some sort of free internet connection. Guys would share rooms.

Was the $55 for hotel per person or for the room? I was covering college football when I traveled and most hotels jacked up the price for home football game weekends to make more money, so what would be a $60 room in a bad hotel was now $100.

 

I'd LOVE to have a jacked-up rate of $100.

I book a year in advance, and still pay upward of $150 sometimes. Try to get a room at a NASCAR race a month before, and the Motel 8 is charging $259 (if they have rooms left).

 

Our paper has slashed traveling, but when we still get to go it is as follows:
The cheapest hotel possible, but one that has wireless
Drive your own car and get .32 cents per mile
$25 per day for food (though, I was told by a higherup that we really get $30, but some people think we don't and no one is going to tell them different).
Also, like IJAG, it is not a per diem. We expense everything at the end of the month.

 

That's because at a NASCAR race, 90 percent of the fans view Motel 8 as the 5* hotel. It's the most popular place in town.

 

wow - i don't question my people because they never abuse the system. in fact, i recently told one guy on staff he should start staying in nicer places. sure enough, he has.

 

Hotel - $0
Food -$0
Car - $0.235 cents per mile. (The extra five is for good luck)

 

$30 a day is pretty brutal... It depends where you are, but that pretty much either forces you to skip meals or stick to the dollar menu...

Good luck eating on $30 if you have to eat in airports...

 

Yeah, that $55 hotel thing seems ridiculous. Hell, you can't get a Motel 6 for that rate in some cities.

I just stayed in a $119 hotel room, and my higher-ups don't have a problem with that, especially since it was just one night. I try to keep hotel rooms for football trips in the $89-$129 a night range, depending on where I am.

I'm sure if for some reason someone else came with me on one of my road trips, we'd split the room. That's how our ACC guys do it.