How to refuse a business trip due to low budget

Question

My boss wants me to take a business trip to meet some team members. This business trip has no other value than just hanging out in person. The given budget for the accommodation would get me a hostel-level kind of accommodation (shared rooms/bathrooms) or the one hotel with this price which has horrible ratings.

For several reasons (mainly hygiene and my safety) I don't want to stay in this type of accommodation.

My friend who takes business trips to the same city in a different company has a budget of double what I have, which allows for nice accommodation.

My boss said he has the same budget and found a great apartment (cannot confirm this).

How do I politely decline this business trip on the basis of not willing to stay in such accommodation? Or should I come up with something else? My main concern is sounding spoiled, but I simply wouldn't feel safe in any of those places.

As a side note, I am also curious how common it is to expect employees to take a business trip and stay in a hostel?

Answer 1

Start off by looking up the most modestly priced hotel that you are willing to stay at, and email your boss the link with a message like:

This is the cheapest reasonable accommodation I could find, but you only budgeted $#.## for accommodations.

Don't bring up that there are cheaper options unless he asks. Don't define "reasonable accommodation" unless he asks. Don't even ask him to take a specific course of action unless he asks what you would prefer to do. You are simply giving him the best option you find reasonable and enough information to let him know that it does not fit into the budget. This places any outcome squarely on his shoulders.

In many cases this will sidestep the whole dilemma:

Either he approves a higher budget and you go (this is more likely than you may think), or he decides it's too much and you don't go. If HE says you don't go, now it's his call instead of yours so you have not done anything against his wishes.

How this improves outcomes where you still have to address the issue:

If he asks you why you can't find anything cheaper, then you explain that everything else you found for cheaper were hostels and in high crime rate areas. While this sounds like it just puts you in the same predicament you're in now, it's not. Now he's asking you a directed question that you are just responding to. It comes off as less needy when your grievances are an answer to a directed question or statement than when it's something you bring up yourself.

Answer 2

Instead of thinking about cancelling the trip, just present your concerns and let the boss decide. You can say something like this without proposing your solution:

I am not able to find a safe and hygienic accommodation in our allowed budget. Can you please suggest an alternative?

Your concern for safety is highlighted and it is employers' responsibility to ensure they do not send their employees where they do not feel safe. (Under "reasonable" limits which of course is a judgement call)

Answer 3

1. Go to your employee handbook or HR website and carefully read the travel and expense policies. Check whether a "fixed budget" is in there or not. Typically employers are required to cover all "reasonable" expenses that you incur and some definition of what "reasonable" is.
2. Unfortunately most travel policies are a little out of date. The whole notion of x dollars pay doesn't really work anymore since hotels and airlines have aggressively shifted to dynamic pricing.
3. These days, the price for the same room n the same hotel can fluctuate by more than a factor of 10. Recently a simple Holiday Inn in Boston that typically costs $120/night shot up to over $1500/night (more than 12x) simply because there was high demand. It's unreasonable to expect the employee to carry the risk of price fluctuations like this.
4. Armed with this info and data, talk to your manager: You can tell them you'd be happy to travel as long as a minimum standard of accommodation and safety can be met. Be as specific as possible: "needs to have private bathroom", cannot be in a "high crime area" in the city, etc. Hopefully these are already spelled out in the travel policy. If not, you have to make them up.
5. Tell your boss that you weren't able to find a viable travel plan that meets the minimum requirements and that you need help to make this work. It's helpful if you can show your homework and present some options: acceptable plan at a higher price, maybe shifting the date to when low-price accommodations are available, etc.

Take it from there. You make a perfectly reasonable request here and hopefully you will get a reasonable answer. If your boss insist on "just suck it up" you have a bunch of options: indeed "suck it up", "pay the difference out of pocket", "refuse to go" or "elevate". Personally I would take it up with HR: shared bathrooms or unsafe part of the city sound like non-starters to me and could result in legal exposure risk for the company. So HR may be inclined to engage.

Answer 4

Yes, you should push back - which let them know that you're not OK with the arrangement provided, but not without providing / suggesting an alternate. There are couple of things you can do:

1. Thank your boss for the idea and budget approval, and then let them know that you're not able to find a suitable accommodation for you in this budget and would appreciate some help on this (Please ensure you ask for help, only mentioning that you're not able to find sounds like a complain or excuse). Either your boss can help you, or they can direct you to the travel /admin department who can help you getting a proper booking.

2. If that's not possible, or you don't find a suitable one, request your boss that whether the planning can be reversed (your colleagues can visit your city)?

However, even after this the decision is not reversed / changed / budget is not extended, you need to take a call whether you need to change your preference, or stick to refusing the trip.

Answer 5

Before anything else: I think you are right to push back on this. If your employer expects you to travel for their benefit, they should make it a pleasure for you.

That said, it's very hard to actually refuse a direct order from your manager. You can obviously express your (extreme) displeasure with it - and absolutely do mention the fact that you don't feel safe - but if he still says "this is the budget, you're going" you have to decide what you're going to do. The three realistic options are:

1. Go anyway.
2. Escalate the issue to your boss's boss and/or HR, probably on safety grounds.
3. Refuse to go. Deal with the consequences of this.

Only you can really say what the consequences of (2) or (3) will be for you, so that's not a decision anyone here can help with.

(There is a fourth option: pay for separate accommodation out of your own pocket. I think this is a terrible idea which sets a terrible precedent so I'm deliberately excluding it from the main list)

Answer 6

I would first check that this isn’t a temporary issue.

Hotel prices and availability can vary a lot over the year. Two common cases are:

• Large events drawing a lot of people from out of town: large conventions, fairs, exhibitions, festivals or event concerts. In many cases this can completely saturate the hotel capacity in the city (and sometimes much further) for the duration of the event (from a single night to a full week or more). Prices will go up, sometimes skyrocket, or rooms will simply not be available.
• Seasons. Some cities have a peak season and an off-peak season, and prices and availability can change quite bit between the two. This is usually more for holiday destinations, but many cities will have both business and tourist visitors and of course the impact of one will end felt by the other. Sometimes just public holidays, long week-ends and the like will have a big effect as well.

Let's take one example: Las Vegas, and I picked the MGM Grand (largest hotel there, over 5000 rooms). According to Google:

• On Tuesday, November 22nd, you can get a room for €78.
• On Tuesday, December 6th, the price goes up to €2233 (no idea what event takes place at that time).
• On Thursday, January 5th, it reaches €2805 (that's during CES), 36 times more!

Las Vegas is the city with the largest hotel capacity in the world (over 150 000 rooms!), so you can imagine that if they get to this state, it's going to be much worse in smaller cities, which sometimes have events that far exceed their capacity.

In a previous life I used to often go to Baselworld, a large exhibition (over 100000 visitors from all over the world back then) in the Swiss city of Basel (which probably has hotel capacity in the thousands of rooms, maybe low tens of thousands). It's basically impossible to find a room in the city during the first few days of Baselworld (they even bring in ships to dock in the city to add more rooms), and most people will have to stay in neighbouring cities, from 30 minutes away to over an hour away! If by any chance you find anything in the city it will cost you an arm and a leg.

For those cases, just moving your trip a few days (at worst a week or two) may make all the difference between outrageous prices (or extremely low quality accommodation for a "normal" price) and a very good deal.

When it's a matter of season it's of course more difficult as you could need to move your trip quite a bit more.

You haven't told us either the destination city or the budget, so we can't tell you if your boss is really being stingy or if it's just bad timing.

Answer 7

It's certainly not normal to be expected to stay in a "hostel" on business travel.

As guidance, I would be looking at the price of a single room in a hotel belonging to a chain (i.e. the kind that cater to business travellers - such as in the UK, Premier Inn or Travelodge, as examples that spring to mind).

If you're a woman, or a man of below-average firmness, then it seems perfectly acceptable to raise the point about feeling unsafe in anything other than a separate room in a business hotel.

And for any person, if the accomodation is not a business hotel, or is not obviously comparable, then it seems fine to simply state that hostel-style living, or staying in a private home that caters to transients and isn't supervised by on-site staff, is not in accordance with how you prefer to live.

Answer 8

Why not ask them to pay for transport and accommodation (aka the apartment) upfront and give you an allowance for food?