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

TRAVEL$ENSECHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION1Welcome from NBAA President John W. OlcottWhat would happen if the actual cost of employee time were considered inbusiness travel decisions? Of course, in general terms, it has been consideredfor decades. Managers have weighed dozens of factors in deciding how to go,used their best judgment and made a call. But usually, out of necessity, it was adecision made on a hunch. The actual, literal cost of employee travel time couldonly be guessed at, with many other more complex time-management issues –and their costs – left unaddressed.The Board of Directors of the National Business Aviation Associationconceived Travel$ense to begin to address these issues. Operators of businessaircraft have long known that because they can provide nonstop travel in aconfidential office environment between more than 5,500 airports in theUnited States alone, their aircraft are the most time-efficient way to travel.What they have not known is how the actual cost of employee travel time, thevalue of employee travel time, the value of productive time enroute, and acount of non-business hours away from home, would alter decision-making andthe perceived value of travel via business aircraft.NBAA has invested considerable amounts of time and money to create acomputer program to add to the information available to decision-makers.Given the program’s modest cost to the user, the Board’s primaryconsideration with regard to pricing obviously was to make the program easilyaffordable by small, single-aircraft flight departments or owner-operators. TheAssociation does not expect to profit from this initiative. We do expectAmerican business, as well as the business aviation community, to benefit.What we have confirmed during Travel$ense’s development is that businessaircraft make business sense, demonstrable in dollars and cents, on most typicalbusiness aircraft trips. We also have verified, to no one’s surprise, that the 7,500plus companies operating 11,000 plus turbine-powered aircraft have anordinary travel option that often is the smart, savvy and business-wise wayto go.It would be easy to dismiss these conclusions as biased, coming as they do froman Association representing business aircraft operators. The assumptions thatform the results, however, are user-defined. Thus, Travel$ense’s conclusions areas credible as you make them. Consequently, in the final analysis, Travel$ense isyour tool, not ours.In many ways, nothing we have done here is new. Companies have beenperforming analyses like this for years, but with far less sophistication in anecessarily arduous and time-intensive manner, which has made the analysesrare and of limited value. All we’ve done is confirm the hunch that businessCopyright © 1999, National Business Aviation Association, Inc.