"Flying out to interview with a single company is easy - they pay for the flights and hotel and you use them. Interviewing with 7 companies made for a surprisingly stressful round of negotiation before I’d even arrived, as I tried to spread the cost according to who could most afford it and who was getting the most time with me."
When I last was searching for an out-of-state (albeit not California) job, every company was adamant about arranging all the flight arrangements. It was very clear they did not want me to interview at other companies during the time. Even after I agreed to pay my own way, they still insisted on paying and have me fly out immediately after the interview. The stress of multiple flights during my short interview period definitely affected my performance.
When relocating from NYC to San Francisco a couple years ago I similarly tried to minimize the number of trips. I tried to be very thorough in phone screens to make sure that they were intersted in me and I was interested in them.
After the first 24 hour trip (leave at night east coast time, fly to SFO, drive south, interview all day, drive back to SFO and fly home) I knew that wasn't going to work (I certainly didn't perform as well on that interview as others).
My next trip was arranged by me with costs split as fairly as I could. I found companies were happy to be flexible and reimbursed me very promptly for their share, but as the article suggests it was a little out of the norms for them and probably harder to arrange then HR or their travel agent doing the "standard package".
I had two companies split the airfare, and others pay for a night hotel each. I didn't chase meal or transportation expenses, though nearly all of them offered to cover them (and generally lunch was part of an interview each day anyways).
I had the opposite impression. I tried to cram 4 interviews into a week so I wasn't constantly flying away from school and every company was more than happy to pay less to fly me out. One company paid for my flight there, one for the return trip, and two lucky places got off paying nothing at all (I had places already lined up with friends nearby to crash at so no one insisted on buying hotel rooms).
I think this might be a case where you cross that company off the list for being unreasonable. You don't want to work in the type of environment if that's typical policy.
When I last was searching for an out-of-state (albeit not California) job, every company was adamant about arranging all the flight arrangements. It was very clear they did not want me to interview at other companies during the time. Even after I agreed to pay my own way, they still insisted on paying and have me fly out immediately after the interview. The stress of multiple flights during my short interview period definitely affected my performance.