Hungry? I eat. "But the company's going to give us a free meal in 2 hours." Who cares, I'm hungry now. What's per diem - $3/hr? So you go on a 3 day 50+ hour 3 day and get $150 in per diem? To feed you above and beyond any meals on the airplane? For normal trips I'd probably struggle to burn through all the per diem on a typical trip. Newbies on the crew? My expenditures went up as Captain. Decided to buy the crew dinner overseas, or pickup up the bar tab, or buy breakfast burritos for the crew, up to 2x a month towards the end of my career, it went to several hundred bucks per trip. Max was probably $700. More often around $300-400 as not everyone on the crew joined us. So net was maybe close to break-even, or slightly negative, on actual expenses vs per diem for the entire month? Oh well.

You can't underspend vs per diem on a trip just paying for yourself???