Archive for the ‘Costs’ Category

Travel Costs

Friday, January 13th, 2012

Yesterday I booked a flight to the USA to speak at a conference and then do a stop over in the mid-West. Because the flight involved a stop over I was not able to make a booking on the Internet and needed to speak with people!!!!

What was interesting was the HUGE range of prices bid – for flights up to 50% more and for car rental up to 100% more.

For the flights, I tried contacting an agent by phone, contacting the airline direct and using a travel agent in the highstreet. Despite a “low fair guarantee” the fare offered directly by the airline was a third more!!! Orignially, the highstreet agent offered a fair nearly 50% more. When I questioned this, the fair came down to slightly higher than the lowest fair.

The car rental was even more interesting, having checked prices on the internet I found that the lowest price was from the highstreet agent’s OWN website – but in their shop the price quoted was nearly double!

So, my advice, be very careful when booking travel – otherwise you will be ripped off!!     

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Travel and Accommodation

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

The classroom training that I do involves running courses onsite and this involves travel and accommodation.

The first question here is whether this is bundled into the fee or charged for separately. Except where the training is close to my London office, I charge for travel and accommodation at cost.

For flights,  rail travel and accommodation I charge this back to my clients at cost and, for these, try to get the best price. For example, when travelling long distance (for example from the UK to the USA) a flight including a weekend can be much cheaper than flying in and out during the week. Commonly, the saving is sufficient to pay for the additional accommodation and care hire – I get a short holiday. Another example of best cost is one client that sent me every where First Class and on two occasions I managed to get them to change a First Class flight too and from the Far East to an around the world Business Class Flight!!!!

Road travel in my car is different. Here I charge on a mileage basis. In the UK the AA publish information that you can use as a basis (see http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/running_costs/petrol2011.pdf. Unfortunately, at times but rarely, the reasonable rate that I charge conflicts with what the client wishes to pay. On one occasion, when this happened, I had the choice between using the shorter mileage from my home to the client (that I had been using)  or the longer distance from my office to the client.

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