I only read it for the articles.

Corporate travel has policies to decide how to make use of suppliers and contracts to provide best practice procedures and give travellers, company guidelines to help make decisions easier. Most times policies work but sometimes they are open for ridicule as in the recent case in the US. A Minnesota county recently considered a bill that would ban county employees from staying in hotels with porn on their pay per view TV systems. The employees would not be reimbursed for their expenses if the hotel offered pornography but it wasn’t made clear how the employees were to figure out whether or not hotels did or did not offer this service.

It’s hard to find a hotel nowadays without the ubiquitous adult movie channel and after all, until Facebook came along, wasn’t porn the number one revenue earner on the net, showing it had a certain following, that hoteliers couldn’t disregard. So the poor Minnesota road warriors now have to contend with a company censorship policy that could trip them up if they happen to book the wrong hotel or if the only hotel available for 100 miles has an adult movie channel. Will the company provide tents in that case ? Can you book a hotel that sells magazines you buy only for the articles (wink, wink) but has no adult channel? Can you stay in a hotel without the adult channel but hookers on the street outside? The traps to no reimbursement are endless.

Seems there are some exceptions to the policy and Minnesota county employees can stay at a hotel with adult TV channels if it also happens to be the official hotel for a conference. Who booked that hotel? Frank has just become the office legend.

Or they have the option of staying at a sin palace if the porn free hotel is 15% more expensive to stay at. The last point is interesting in that the county has now put a price on porn, so it’s not so much about shielding the traveller but more about the bottom line, get it bottom.

Gotta work on my delivery.

Either way it leaves the policy open to misinterpretation and isn’t that the reason policies are brought in, so that the company can give clear directions to make employee decisions easier. What do your policies look like?