Thoughts on claiming reimbursements for FF tickets

[roman91]

Does anyone have any thoughts or experience on claiming a cash reimbursement for a flight they might have booked using FF points?

For example, a conference would offer $x reimbursement in 'travel costs'. A flight might cost $1300 (for example) but I can use 25,000 points instead + taxes. Have people had success providing a receipt (25000 points + taxes) alongside a screenshot of what the dollar cost would have been alongside a justification for all of this?

I've now encountered this issue in businesses, conferences and universities, but haven't really dived deep with their finance teams.

 

[Happy Dude]

Feels like you're trying to scam someone. I'll sell you 25k QFF for $1,300 though.

 

[levelnine]

Depends entirely on the organisation and their processes.

More likely to succeed when you're using points for a class of service higher than they will reimburse you for (eg they'll pay $2,000 for an economy ticket & you are proposing to use points in order to fly business).

 

[dairyfloss]

Does anyone have any thoughts or experience on claiming a cash reimbursement for a flight they might have booked using FF points?

For example, a conference would offer $x reimbursement in 'travel costs'. A flight might cost $1300 (for example) but I can use 25,000 points instead + taxes. Have people had success providing a receipt (25000 points + taxes) alongside a screenshot of what the dollar cost would have been alongside a justification for all of this?

I've now encountered this issue in businesses, conferences and universities, but haven't really dived deep with their finance teams.

My employer used to allow this, offering to reimburse taxes & fees together with a percentage of the BFoD price for an equivalent ticket (up to a certain dollar value, IIRC), however at a point in time they terminated this, as it became too time consuming to administer, and was introducing tax considerations for the business and employees that they didn't want to deal with. I used my own points for upgrades, but nothing else. For paid upgrades, I did it from my own pocket and claimed back from personal tax.

 

[roman91]

Feels like you're trying to scam someone. I'll sell you 25k QFF for $1,300 though.

Haha, yeah I can see why you would think that. The $1300 was a (bad) hypothetical... That said, I wouldn't be far off considering I live in Tasmania and cash tickets get pretty expensive

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 1:50 PM

My employer used to allow this, offering to reimburse taxes & fees together with a percentage of the BFoD price for an equivalent ticket (up to a certain dollar value, IIRC), however at a point in time they terminated this, as it became too time consuming to administer, and was introducing tax considerations for the business and employees that they didn't want to deal with. I used my own points for upgrades, but nothing else. For paid upgrades, I did it from my own pocket and claimed back from personal tax.

Excellent strategy!! Thanks