If you eat in the restaurant and purchase the meals the Indians in the office worked the numbers on, you might be able to survive on 55 GBP a day in London. Personally, I can never seem to fit it into the given allowances without skipping breakfast.
It might have something to do with the allowances taking into account the discount offered by the hotel but NOT the taxes or room service delivery fees applied.
The point I think some people are trying to make is very simple, demented and anyone else having trouble understanding:
You're away from home a LOT with EK. It'd be nice if wit weren't a miniscule allowance, calculated to the cent, literally, by some bean-counter (or lentil-counter in EK's case) that we have to exist on.
In some cases such as Sydney and Brisbane, the allowances are withheld for the second portion of the stay just in case you don't come back from wherever to the hotel. God forbid they might pay out a few bucks they could've saved.
The point is people hate the feeling of being drip-fed starvation rations by a bunch of tight-arses with fists tighter than a fish's butthole or a nun's nasty or what have you.
A mate at Qantas has to buy me beers in Singapore after my paltry one-round allowance is exhausted because he is paid nearly 3x what I get for the same 24hr period.
The salary, well that's another thing. The whole idea used to be you get paid a lot more to put up with living a long way from home. But with such wonderful buildings to look at here, it is no longer so desirable to go back home one day and I don't mind sliding further and further behind the CPI, if there even is one here.
Why some people think it's fine to be butt-poled financially just for the privilege of being away from home is OKAY is simply beyond me.