[1]Did we lose our focus on global employee benefits? Hopefully not! In fact, global employee benefits do include insurance and assistance services pertaining to international travel, so we thought you might be interested in hearing this fascinating news from one of our adjacent industries, travel, as reported in February 2016 by B2B website travelmarketreport.com [2] .
Available as a mobile phone app, OneGo offers unlimited U.S. domestic flights on plans starting at $2,950 a month, and U.S. regional plans starting at $1,500. More than 700 routes among 76 airports on major airlines such as American, United, Delta, and three more are included. Users are limited to economy class but they can earn frequent-flyer miles, choose seats, and redeem upgrades via the app; reservations and changes must be made at least seven days in advance. OneGo’s primary target is small to mid-sized businesses and its website is here [3].
What does this mean to the global employee benefits industry? Probably not much in the short term, except that the cost of well-planned high-frequency traveling and of commuting between major U.S. cities appears to come down substantially, which may help to revive the habit of face-to-face meetings with clients and with colleagues. Remember the days before skype?
Another consideration is the rise of easy-to-budget, “all-you-can-eat”, flat-fee type of products and services: Set aside USD 30K a year and there will no surprises in the travel budget. As an additional advantage, flights can be booked for personal travel; like business/private-use cell phones or laptop computers earlier, a new perquisite is born. Whether the I.R.S. will treat this employee benefit as taxable income is still an open question.
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