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

90TRAVEL$ENSE• You have accurate flight and cost information for a past trip and wouldprefer to input this rather than run in “time-shift” mode and back-datecurrent flight information.• You are running a purely hypothetical case that otherwise does not havecomparable airline information.WHEN NOT TO USE MANUAL INPUT• Management will not accept rough estimates of airline schedules (time ofday, length of flight, exact time of connection has a substantial impact oncost) and prices. Manual input trips will be part of the historical dataTravel$ense generates and prints on the Summary Report. If all of theother trips were priced real-time via Travel$ense, you may not want tomix these trips with one or more trips for which manual input was used.• When you obtained flight information but were not able to price a flightoption, normally Travel$ense would then use fare lookup to build up aprice. If you have accurate price information you also could click on “EditFares” to input a fare manually. This button always is available to click on aslong as you have flight information. You can pick your own winning trip ifneeded via the “Define Trip” button and then input a fare. Double click oneach row in the upper display to get a look at the fare codes open on yourtrip.HOW WILL MANUAL INPUT AFFECT THE RESULTS?Of the two aspects of an airline trip, the airline schedule is the most important.Not only do schedules change frequently, but available seats at the time ofdecision making are impossible to predict or estimate. Only seats available forpurchase at the time of decision making are reasonable to consider in a realisticcomparison of the true cost of travel. Thus, even having an accurate airlinetimetable is of limited value in providing a realistic estimate of the cost of tripoptions. Seat availability shortly before the departure date often is extremelylimited and will force travelers to take less appealing flight options. Since theexact availability of seats determines which flights you can take, which in turnhas a large effect on the time of day, length of trip and ultimately the value ofemployee travel time, the results you create by hand will have much lesscredibility than those done automatically using built-in pricing features.Using Manual InputClick on the Manual Input button to get the pop-up input screen, which asksyou to input the minimum required information necessary for Travel$ense tocalculate trip costs and times. For each leg of the trip, you can input one tothree flights. Results are shown in the upper portion of the screen as you go.You can switch between flights by clicking on the row in the upper grid or byCopyright © 1999, National Business Aviation Association, Inc.