What's our travel reimbursement policy?

[kelle]

• Economy class + up to $50 for seat selection. If more expensive cabin is purchased, please provide the cost of the economy fare on the same flight and that's what will be reimbursed.
• ok to pay more for direct flights.
• no booze.
• up to GSA per diem rate, no meal receipts but please request as close to actual costs as possible.
• every effort should be made to purchase flights at least 30 days in advance of travel.

[astrofrog]

I'm in agreement with these - in particular no meal receipts should hopefully make things easier for NumFOCUS (and us).

• This is going to sound silly, but when booking flights carbon offsetting is sometimes offered, and it's usually a small expense so I'm wondering whether we want to ok/encourage that?

[astrofrog]

• We should also explicitly say any airline is ok
• Upper limit on hotel expenses?

[eteq]

I alike most of this, but a few riffs on that:

• Should we say how much more for direct flights? E.g. 25% more is ok but 100% more is not.
• Perhaps say something like "if you have to violate the rules, give a clear written reason and it still might be ok"? Or do we want to have the rules be rules?
• On Hotel Expenses: Maybe we tie it to the GSA lodging limits with a caveat of "but if it's the conference hotel that's probably ok" or similar? In my experience that's fairly reasonable (that's the policy I'm under), although the caveat of "sometimes it's ok to violate if you have a good reason" is important here...
• I like the idea of allowing for carbon offsets, but with some reasonable limit (e.g., a certain percentage of the total travel or something).

One clarifying question for @kelle's point I didn't understand: where is "no booze" relevant here? Meaning we should have people not count that in their per diem, or no "extra" booze at hotels, flights, etc?

[astrofrog]

Should we say how much more for direct flights? E.g. 25% more is ok but 100% more is not.

This kind of rule might start to get frustrating and extra work for people to come up with documentation etc. What if it costs 50% more but is say 12 hours instead of 36 hours with a 12 hour layover? I'd vote for not including such a clause. If we really want we could say that above a certain amount this has to be checked by someone else prior to purchasing to make sure it's not ridiculous?

[kelle]

Great ideas -- keep 'em comin! We can synthesize better into an actual policy when the time comes.

And I don't know the answer about the "no booze" rule. This is something which I think we should discuss at some point. Are we ok with someone justifying the full per diem with drinks?

(btw, just to let you know that we're not off the rails here: we spend a non-trivial amount of time discussing this policy in AAS Board meetings as well.)

[astrofrog]

And I don't know the answer about the "no booze" rule. This is something which I think we should discuss at some point. Are we ok with someone justifying the full per diem with drinks?

I think there's a difficulty here that if we don't check receipts for meals then it's difficult to police this anyway. What about super expensive food? I can see why some places just grant the full per diem and no questions asked...

[taldcroft]

I think that just up to the per diem, no receipts is fine (and yes, encourage people to ask for what they spent if it is less). My earlier comment about no booze was related to providing free alcohol at official functions (e.g. the fall coordination meeting), where there is direct visibility of how we are spending money. But however they choose to spend their per diem is fine.

I will say that in my experience the gov't per diem is usually 25-50% more than I actually spend, but I guess I'm not a big eater or partier.

[taldcroft]

And :+1: on using common sense with flights for the reasons stated. I often fight with travel about the money saved on a layover vs. what they end up paying for me to be sitting around in an airport. For us it is more of an issue because there is a preferred Gov't airline for each city which is uncorrelated with airlines that have good connections there.

[kelle]

Lynn (NumFocus) will send us their policy just to take a look at, but we can really make our own.

[pllim]

What about AirBnB, Uber, Lyft?

[eteq]

(for some context to the above: this was a discussion the CoCo was having but then realized there was no need for it to be in a private repo).

What about AirBnB, Uber, Lyft?

I'd say those are permissible. We've certainly relied on them in the past when funded through other channels! (but opinions may vary?)

[bsipocz]

airbnb is almost always cheaper than the hotels. So is that the encouraged way, or just permitted?

[eteq]

airbnb is almost always cheaper than the hotels. So is that the encouraged way, or just permitted?

Well, there's multiple factors there - yes it's often cheaper, but sometimes the quality is much worse, and there's insurance questions, etc. I think it should be left to the discretion of the individual to some extent how they weight those factors.

Not sure how much of that got across above, but the CoCo's thinking was that we don't want to be overly prescriptive. That is, these are generally to be guidelines rather than hard-and-fast rules like some institutions have.

[pllim]

And car rental? Are we required to buy certain insurance and so on?

[hamogu]

We have discussed this in the finance committee again today since this is a long open issue. I summarize the results of that discussion here.

• In many cases, restrictions are placed by the sponsor, e.g. government funds often limit to economy class (e.g. for many EU or US funds) or even certain carriers (e.g. US flag carriers for US government funds [*]). An Astropy policy could only be more restrictive and that's not helpful here.
• In some cases (e.g. https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/issues/222) Astropy has been supporting other travel, not paid the full sum. We don't want to bureaucratically add another layer of rules onto something that already has rules. In this kind of fixed-sum payment ("Astropy supports with this trip with 1000 $") we are also less worried about unreasonably expensive hotels, flight etc. since it's in the travelers best interest to make best use of the funds.
• Most people travel reasonably (e.g. take a cheap flight, but be willing top spend a little more if it's significantly faster) anyway. Much of the discussion is about rare edge cases ("What percentage of total trip cost should be allowed for a flight that save X minutes of time?"). We had (COVID!) very few trips that Astropy has ever paid in full, so none of these cases has ever come up in practice. Let's wait until we have at least a little real world use cases.
• Note that one point of this is that we worry about people spending too little where someone might take a hotel that far out of the way in an unsafe area, just to shave off a few $ from the bill. We are worried that this could become an equity issue where more senior / better roped-in people select more expensive hotels/flights/... because they feel entitled and others never dare to ask. A set of policies could establish what the community thinks is reasonable. However, currently, all trip requests come from people very involved in Astropy and used to the (US-) astronomy travel circus. We need to convince more junior / geographically diverse / ... people to ask for funds in the first place before them underspending can even be a problem. So, for this issue, a travel policy would try to solve a hypothetical problem that may never exist.

We don't rule out ever having a travel policy along the line discussed above, but at this point there does not seem to a problem that would have to be solved with a policy.

*: Yes, I know, some foreign governments have OpenSkys aggeements with the US and NASA money might be spend on their carriers, too, but the point is that it's out of Astropy's hands to make that call and thus there is little use in having an Astropy policy in that particular example.