Over the past five years, the company has admitted that 4,684 train tickets, 565 hotel rooms and 1,226 taxi rides have been canceled – and the broadcaster has been unable to request a refund.
Abandoned train journeys cost the BBC £ 233,000, canceled hotel bookings added another £ 61,500 to the bill, while abandoned taxi journeys cost £ 18,000.
That means the BBC has wasted more than £ 5,000 each month on transportation and housing that no one used for the five years. Each unused taxi cost the public broadcaster an average of £ 15, canceled train tickets cost around £ 50 each, while hotel rooms booked that were left empty cost an average of £ 100.
The BBC says it is trying to keep canceled bookings to a minimum, and for unused airline tickets, their booking agent American Express will automatically claim the money back.
For taxis, it states that all BBC tariffs have an initial waiting time of 10 minutes built into the charge and that this is usually enough to allow late passengers to get their taxi. The train tariffs say that many tickets that are not picked up from machines will be refunded, but you cannot reclaim cheaper “advance tariffs” as these are non-refundable.
Due to the pandemic and lockdowns, there has been much less travel in the last year and the BBC’s wasted travel and accommodation bill has been cut significantly, although it was still close to £ 10,000.
Andrew Allison, chairman of the board of directors of the Freedom Association, said: “The BBC has to prove to all royalty payers that it is good value for money – more, now it is charging a royalty of over 75 years of history on how it is not. The answer for the company is simple: become a private company that makes revenue from the crowd of people who want to subscribe to its services and those stories will go away.
A BBC spokeswoman said: “As a 24-hour international broadcaster, significant travel is inevitable and the nature of our work means that plans can often change at short notice.
“We always think of the cost, we have strict policies to keep expenses to a minimum, and we will get the cost back wherever possible.”
