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$250 is a rounding error for most international business travelers. That's the cost of one moderately nice business dinner for 3 people. Between airfare, hotels, and meals, that's less than 10% of the cost of almost all international business trips, with the possible exception of some quick jump from Toronto to Detroit for a lunch meeting.
Same for a lot of international leisure travelers.
This is a filter to keep 'the poors' away
For 1 person you could, but send over a team and it just added up. You'd do it only if you really need to woo a customer, something that directly adds to the bottom line. If it's for training or a casual meeting, why would you? I know the perception is companies have endless money but they really don't and they pinch pennies plenty. Travel adds up.
I work for a company that has 6 figures of employees.
We travel to the USA regularly. This will immediately get flagged and bump the overall travel cost.
The percentage doesn't change for a team vs individual. 3 people also need 3 plane tickets, 3 hotel rooms, etc.
The boss doesn't care about the percentage, they care about the bill. The total amount.
I am one of the bosses. I've been around lots of businesses that do this kind of thing, including tiny startups.
I'm telling you for most businesses, if they've bothered to send someone on a business trip that costs $2500+ per person for an important reason, they aren't going to cancel it over $250. That's foolish.
Business travel elasticity has traditionally been around 0.4, meaning business travellers will tolerate higher fees with only a small drop in demand. But there would still be a drop.
What no one has mentioned here so far is that the $250 additional visa fee is refundable. But it's not automatically refunded. You have apply for it after meeting some basic conditions. So for businesses, it's really a much smaller administrative cost.
So far the process for applying for the refund hasn't been established. So it's all a bit of a hot mess still.
Fun part is that if the fee is refundable, but requires a process, then some company travel policies might stick such a fee with the employee if they fail to correctly do the process to get the refund. In such a company it might be one more thing for an employee to think about declining travel because they might personally get stuck with the bill.
Ironically cash strapped startups might not care like a big multinational would.
Travel expenses in a bearaucracy can get weird and people who don't care about the business case are in charge of travel expenses, and they only get recognition by cutting costs, often in stupid ways.
I worked at a company like that and to give an example of the results of such a bearaucracy, they had this 20 thousand dollar product that shipped maybe 500 units a year. For some reason they became fixated on if they could delete a 25 cent part to reduce cost. The team sized the regulatory work needed to evaluator and presented the 60 thousand dollar estimate and figured that would be the end of it, no way you would spend 60k to maybe cut total company cost by 125 dollars per year. To their surprise the project was approved, they did the work, and confirmed the 25 cent part was still needed to be in compliance with some government regulations...
I already said it's not about 1 person, it's about a team. I see you're finally adding the caveats "for an important reason", that's what I've been saying all along. Now you just have to add the other things I've been saying: For training and random conferences, it adds up. It's about the total cost. Etc. Ok I think this has reached its end point, ciao.
A lot of company travel policies are strangely stingy on cost.
But even before this, business travel has been diminished. I've been a part of planning for a particular conference in the fall. It usually has a lot of European presenters and lots of meetings among international companies. There's been a bit of a scramble because most of the people that were expected to speak are not going to travel to the US. Our company is spending a bit more to send people over to key clients in Europe near that time to replace the typical meet up at the conference. People were already nervous about Trump's ICE enough to declare the US to not be approved for business travel.
International tourism is just being screwed all over the place.