Scandal: Denver Airport Execs Drop $165K On Madrid Trip, With $19K Flights

Executives at Denver International Airport (DEN) are facing some criticism over a recent work trip to Madrid, where they spent anywhere from $9K to $19K per person on tickets to get there (thanks to Zen for flagging this). Is the criticism warranted, or is this much ado about nothing?

Denver Airport’s very expensive trip to a conference in Spain

CBS News Colorado has the story of how Denver International Airport CEO Phillip Washington and his eight top executive flew to Madrid in April 2025, for a three-day airport terminal conference. All nine of them flew either first or business class on all legs.

What’s causing some public outrage is how much they spent on their tickets, as was discovered under Colorado’s Open Records Act. Airport funding of course comes from what passengers pay for concessions, parking fees, rental car revenue, and more.

The team spent a total of $165K on the trip, or an average of $18K per traveler, including flights, hotels, meals, conference costs, and ground transportation. What’s causing the most anger among the public is how much was spent on flights. The cheapest ticket came in at over $9K, while the most expensive ticket cost over $19K. Yep, that’s just for flights between Denver and Madrid.

Airport executives have defended themselves, with Washington stating that “our policy allows us to do that,” and also saying “you got to hit the ground running, you literally go from the plane to a meeting or a conference or whatever.” However, CBS points out that they landed the day before their conference started (that’s not to say that they didn’t have meetings that day, though).

The CEO’s Chief of Staff has also been criticized for violating the employee travel policy, which allows employees to add a maximum of two business days onto their work trip, to prevent employees from using work trips as a jumping off point for a lengthy vacation. But that’s exactly what she did, as she only returned from Europe two weeks later.

When Washington was confronted about that, he said “I did not know about the rule,” and that “we’ll deal with that accordingly, we will take care of this.” Since Washington and most of the team returned home on a Friday, he was asked if they couldn’t have flown home more economically since they had the weekend ahead of them, and he responded “the policy allows that, so we took advantage of that.”

Washington also defended the decision by saying “those costs may seem high, they are an investment in our people,” and that “we sent who we sent, and they are going to pay dividends as we build out this infrastructure.”

My take on this airport executive controversy

So, I can sort of see both sides here, and I think this reflects the larger issue that exists with so many travel policies nowadays.

To the credit of the airport executives, it doesn’t seem unreasonable for them to fly business class on an overseas work trip. Furthermore, business class tickets often are very expensive, and that’s how airlines make much of their profits (the $500 economy tickets that they sell across the Atlantic are basically just “gas money”). Heck, airports even benefit from those high fares, because they’re what allow airlines to launch long haul routes, including to Denver.

Furthermore, there’s obviously a lot of potential upside to airport executives attending a conference like this, as it could lead to new airlines launching service to the airport, and that could have a positive impact in the tens of millions.

On the other hand, when you step back, this kind of gets at the absurdity of so many corporate travel policies. Often the policy simply dictates what class of service you can fly in, with no regard for the cost, or no one enforcing that you pick the cheapest routing, if it’s marginally less convenient.

That’s how you end up in a situation where you book a $19K ticket. “Well, our policy says I can do it, and that’s what the ticket costs, so that’s what I’m booking.” The employees figure it’s a rounding error to their bottom line anyway, and no one will notice. The joys of spending other peoples’ money.

I imagine if each of the people had been quoted the cost of the ticket they ended up booking, and were told they could receive 25% of what they saved in cash if they booked a cheaper ticket, things would’ve looked very different. There needs to be more corporate travel policy reform, if you ask me, and I think this incident is the perfect example of why.

But I hardly think the folks from Denver Airport are along in acting this way. I’d say that the people who actually do their best to save their employer money on travel expenses when they have no direct incentive to do so are the exception rather than the norm.

Heck, this is one of the reason that many airlines have revenue based frequent flyer programs. They’re literally trying to incentivize business travelers to book more expensive tickets to rack up more rewards.

Bottom line

Denver Airport executives are facing some backlash, after a recent trip to attend a conference in Madrid racked up $165K in expenses, with flight tickets ranging in cost from $9K to $19K each.

Do I think they could have booked cheaper tickets, and should have? Absolutely! Am I surprised that people working for an organization that dictates class of service of travel but not cost ended up spending a fortune on flights, just because they could? Absolutely not…

What do you make of this Denver Airport executive controversy?