I work for a global contract company that employs over 7k people. I work in a local/U.S. based office building, and travel was never part of the job description – though every once in awhile shit happens and they ask for volunteers to go help out in other places. However, this is happening more and more lately.
The travel arrangement is thus: you pay for everything out of pocket. You pay for the plane, car rental, food, hotel, etc. Then you save all your receipts. Then you spend hours compiling everything and you file an expense report at the end of your trip. Then you wait anywhere from 4 weeks to 6 months to get reimbursed.
Not only is this highly abnormal for a company of this size, this should be fucking illegal. But we still have people that volunteer for this bullshit. Managers/regional managers all get corporate cards that they use to travel with, so there's literally no reason we can't have a few cards assigned to the office that we'd check out whenever one of us leaves to travel. Us peons get nothing, and have to deal with all the extra paperwork. Not to mention, being out of a grand or two of our own goddamn money. All for the wondrous honor of getting to travel for work, I guess.
I am trying to get my wanderlust-happy coworkers to see reason and stop volunteering, because this shit will get fixed real quick if everyone stops voluntarily enabling this selfish company's actions. Coworkers are slowly coming around. The company has the budget to pay for travel, they have the system set in place for managers already. There's zero fucking excuse to take advantage of employees like this.