Nina's Blog - Wednesday 29th April 2026

@ninalanyon The food looks good Nina

@turbineman40 It was very good, and good value for money too.

@ArishMell The company I worked for for thirty years did the same. We used to get either a fixed amount dived into two thirds for accommodation and one third for food, local transport, etc. And if either category exceeded the set (and quite generous amount) they would pay the receipted costs.

we were sternly instructed that we were representing the company so we were not to stay in places that we could not take a customer to, and that's reasonable. So I used to rent a flat because I was typically away for at least two weeks at the same location. The accommodation allowance was about a hundred pounds a night and that rented a pretty good flat in the 1990s in Poland.

Then they were taken over by a large international engineering company and the rules started changing, first they insisted on only certain chains as you mentioned, with the connivance of the in house travel agent we ignore that for as long as we could but eventually they forced us to book through the travel agent website instead of by talking to her and later they switched to receipted only for accommodation. As you say, almost certainly more expensive.

@ninalanyon I see your point but what a customer might think or our accommodation did not arise because we worked on his site. His representatives visited our company's premises, not the out-workers' hotels.

I suspect such policies are created by office-bound spreadsheet-jockeys and management-theoreticians who never had to work away from the company head office, apart from occasional day-trips to the company's other premises!

@ArishMell I never had an actual customer visit me at my hotel, except perhaps for the time I was taken back there after a dinner involving the customer factory manager at which I got very drunk. That was in China in the late 1980s and was an immensely positive event!

@turbineman40 Where did you go?

@ninalanyon My younger brother’s wife passed a couple of weeks ago. He brought her ashes here, spent the night with me. Then drove to Danielsville Georgia to leave her ashes with her brother. Then my brother, Richard and I drove to Groveland, Florida to visit with our older sister Esther. We all attended our High School Reunion last Saturday morning. On Tuesday, Richard and I drove back to Danielsville, GA to celebrate the funeral of his wife. Then we drove on to Anderson, South Carolina to visit our younger sister Kathleen. We drove back home to my place in High Point, North Carolina yesterday. Richard is driving home to Poquoson,Virginia today.