Travel$ense User's Guide (PDF, 139 MB) - NBAA

TRAVEL$ENSEIf you have a less-than-ideal situation and can benefit from illustrating tomanagement and others the value the flight department can provide to yourcompany, than Travel$ense may help. It can aid in pre-trip decision making forthose trips that fall into the gray areas requiring a judgment call. Post-trip, it cantrack productivity and efficiency gains provided by the flight department overtime. Consequently, it can be critical to demonstrating the value of businessaviation to finance or accounting personnel during a quarter, or over thecourse of a year.181Travel$ense is both a new strategy to help companies value business travel anda new tool to facilitate that strategy. Reaction to the program from flightdepartment personnel and nonaviation company management has ranged fromcuriosity to fascination to astonishment to enthusiasm. Because the Travel$ensestrategy is user-defined, NBAA anticipates – and hopes – that the utility of theprogram will be high.DOES TRAVEL$ENSE ALWAYS SHOW THAT BUSINESS AIRCRAFT ARE THEBEST WAY TO TRAVEL?No, because business aircraft are not always the best way to travel, in a strictbusiness sense. Travel$ense is a sophisticated, user-defined decision matrix thateach company can customize using its own assumptions. Depending on thoseassumptions and many other variables (such as dates/times/city pairs/number ofpassengers/ticket and aircraft costs, etc.), trips can ordinarily be shown to beflown best via airlines or via business aircraft. It just depends.Because the program is user-defined, using your assumptions, it can help justifytripling a flight department, or closing it. That is a sharp point on the argumentthat Travel$ense is not simply a program to make business aircraft look good. Itis a program that tracks employee business travel productivity. Additionally,because business aircraft often are a more time-efficient way to travel, it has asa side benefit the realization and illustration that business aircraft often are asmart, savvy way to go.The program is dispassionate in its analysis, given your assumptions. Over 2,000data points are utilized in processing a typical trip. Consequently, and withoutconsidering several of the unquantified benefits of business aircraft, some tripsmay best be flown via the airlines, some via business aircraft.For existing flight departments, when considering a trip that comes up a winnerand loser, it is important to recognize that overall service to the company iswhat counts. We have found that Travel$ense often confirms the hunch – on adollars-and-cents basis – that business aircraft are a time-efficient and costeffectiveway to travel.Copyright © 1999, National Business Aviation Association, Inc.