I don't understand this logic. Time == money. Unless your presence is crucial and you must minimize your time away from your home office this approach seems the most logical and cost effective.
I'm already 100% remote, so I can contribute effectively whether I'm at home or in a hotel recuperating from a 12 hour APAC flight in coach.
This works perfectly fine, but I’d honestly want to minimize random time spent away from my wife and child.
It’s ok if you only fly once in a blue moon, but if you have to travel multiple times a month, you cannot just keep padding every trip with 2 days extra.
Flying business I can reasonably work during the flight, and for overnight flights I can sleep. Which reduces the productivity loss due to lack of sleep (I arrive with a few hours of sleep) and jetlag (adjustment happens quicker than when I didn't sleep for 30h and my schedule is entirely shot to hell). Whether you arrive early or not seems like a separate angle from whether it's worth having people fly business.
Yeah. I like flying business but with the exception of the rare tight schedule I’m almost always going to travel on a long trip a day or two early to adjust to time zones and otherwise acclimate anyway.
You might want to look into Rocketrip (https://www.rocketrip.com). Their product is pretty much what you just described - you don't get straight cash, but you can get prepaid visa cards that get close.
Keep in mind that a day of work is charged between 1300 and 1500 USD to the client. So if you add an extra day of rest on each side there's not much difference
The math here is simple.