Yes, I think big companies especially tend to view it that way. Governments have passed some of these rules about employee travel having to use the miles&#x2F;points for official purposes mostly because it&#x27;s politically popular to hammer &quot;government waste&quot;, even using tools that aren&#x27;t very efficient hammers. Companies tend to take a bigger-picture view when they&#x27;re worried about travel budgets, instead of the relative penny-pinching of going after airline miles. For example when there&#x27;s internal pressure to cut corporate travel budgets, two common policies are: 1) direct managers to reduce unnecessary travel, e.g. cut out 10% of trips entirely, and 2) institute a rule that employees have to book through the corporate travel agent and normally must pick one of the routes that&#x27;s within x% of the cheapest business class fare.<p>The miles themselves, yeah, I think they just see as a minor compensation to employees for travel, since they don&#x27;t pay them overtime or anything. Plus in some cases it&#x27;s not precisely a kickback. Sometimes it is, but other times it&#x27;s intended to incentivize the traveler to stick with their main airline even when the airline has worse routes to some cities. For example, you usually fly United, but today you want to fly to a city where American has a nonstop and United has only a 1-stop, for similar prices. Absent any kind of loyalty program, you&#x27;d pick American&#x27;s nonstop for convenience. United&#x27;s perks are supposed to encourage you to take the United 1-stop, even though it&#x27;s a bit less convenient. This isn&#x27;t precisely a kickback in the normal sense, because they aren&#x27;t incentivizing you to buy a higher fare, and it&#x27;s basically a wash from the employer&#x27;s perspective. Instead they&#x27;re incentivizing you to accept being personally inconvenienced with a worse flight, in return for receiving some personal perks.