The language of operational travel.

Leased travel policy

A leased travel policy is the set of rules that decides who travels on transport an organisation owns, leases, or charters, when seats are limited and there is no fare to ration them. Where a commercial travel policy uses budgets and cabin class to manage demand, a leased travel policy uses priority, quotas, and seat allocation.

You can build one with the free Leased Travel Policy Builder.

Operational travel

Operational travel is travel that is core to running the business — moving crews, rotations, and field staff to sites — rather than occasional point-to-point business trips. It typically combines owned, leased, and commercial transport across air, sea, and land, and is planned around rosters and operations rather than individual choice.

Priority replaces price

Priority replaces price is the principle behind leased and owned transport policy: because the seat has no fare, money cannot balance supply and demand, so the policy allocates scarce seats by priority instead.

Rationing mechanism

The three ways scarce travel is rationed: price (commercial travel, where the fare is the gatekeeper), authority (business travel, where an approver holding delegated financial authority says yes or no) and entitlement (private travel, where the rules grant the seat, sanctions protect the rules and no approver intervenes). The channel names are arbitrary; the mechanism defines the channel. The mechanisms are set out on the policy page.

Two channels

Business travel and private travel, separated by one test: is the trip approved? Business travel is approved under delegation of financial authority and carries a claim number. Private travel is not approved: quota, entitlement or the traveller's own payment says yes with no approver in the loop, which the category page calls auto-approved and the policy schema calls unapproved; the three words name one channel. Subsidised travel is private travel that the traveller pays for through the card gateway; unsubsidised private travel is governed by quota and penalties. The full thesis is on the category page.

Booking number

The number the platform issues when a request becomes a booking. No traveller can consume a travel service without one: it is the first of the two gates, and the claim number is the second. The SAP piece calls it a trip number; they are one gate. Both gates are set out on the category page.

Claim

A claim is the authoritative approval for travel and access to money. A request is not a booking — approval turns one into the other, as a quote becomes a sale — and in the business channel the approval a request must hold is a claim. Many bookings can attach to one claim, and claim revisions and approvals track the journey rather than a single moment.

The claim is where the two gates meet: bookings attach to it on the demand side, and on the supply side no content provider is paid without an approved claim number. Claims post to the organisation's finance system, which is what makes travel spend visible, governed, and reconcilable end to end.

The claim is a business-channel object; private-channel requests become bookings with no claim, because the quota is the approval and no company money moves.

Offline travel

Travel arranged outside an organisation's automated booking systems — by email, phone, spreadsheet, or a locally invented workflow — and reconciled by hand afterwards. In the travel industry the online/offline split is usually read as a maturity measure: the more bookings go through the tool, the better the programme.

In workforce operations a high offline share is not a maturity failure; it is evidence that the installed software does not model the enterprise, and every manual workaround marks a requirement the system could not absorb. The argument in full is on the workforce aviation logistics page.

Content source

Where a booking's content comes from: a GDS or NDC channel for commercial fares, a company's own aircraft, vessels and camps, or a phone call to an operations desk. In UnityTrip the source is a property of the booking, not a separate channel, so offline and self-service travel sit in one record. For a travel management company, UnityTrip can itself be a content source into its mid and back office; see the page for TMCs.

Mid office and back office (TMC)

The systems behind a travel management company's agents: the mid office matches bookings, changes and approvals into a workflow and the back office invoices, reconciles and posts them. Most were built for one content source, the GDS, and handle other content by hand, which is why a client with company aircraft becomes a portal the agent logs into. A mid and back office that accepts an extra content source receives that travel as a feed instead.

Unmanaged travel

Travel that happens outside an organisation's travel programme: booked without the approved channel, so no policy is applied, no approval is recorded, no negotiated rate is used, and the traveller is invisible to duty of care until something goes wrong. The travel industry treats the unmanaged share as leakage to be reduced.

In workforce operations the largest unmanaged category is usually the one nobody counts: seats on transport the organisation owns, leases, or charters. Because the seat carries no fare, most spend reports value it at zero, so it never appears as unmanaged spend at all. Unmanaged travel and offline travel overlap but are not the same thing — unmanaged means outside the programme; offline means outside the automated systems. The unmanaged-spend review measures the unmanaged fraction, including the travel valued at zero.

PNR (passenger name record)

The single record that holds a traveller's booking: passengers, segments, and the status of each, created when the booking is made and referenced by every later action. Airlines invented it; UnityTrip uses one PNR per journey across commercial, leased, chartered, and ground legs, so the record, the approval, and the cost allocation are one.

Travel group

The set of passenger types that share rules. Entitlements, quotas and booking windows are set per travel group, and a traveller books within the rules their travel group carries. Crew, contractors, management and visitors are typical groups; which groups exist and what each may book is configured per organisation.

Revenue management (leased travel)

Deciding who flies when the seat has no fare. A commercial airline uses price to fill the aircraft with the most valuable demand; a company fleet does the same job by entitlement: a priority matrix, quotas, booking windows, displacement and go-shows decide who boards and keep the aircraft full. Seat utilisation is the yield measure, and the seat allocation policy is the instrument.

Revenue accounting (leased travel)

Keeping the money right for the same seats: a value line per passenger per segment frozen at booking, liability held until the segment is flown, penalties earned on cancellation, refunds per passenger per segment reconciled to the payment gateway on the private side, and cost reversals posted to the ledger of record on the business side. Where the organisation runs a ledger of record such as SAP, it stays the master ledger and UnityTrip keeps the shadow books for travel, synchronised through daily balances; where there is no ERP, UnityTrip holds the authoritative books.

Enterprise AI

AI applied to an organisation's own operational data to review it, diagnose problems and execute fixes; the term is used across the software industry. On this site it means the loop review, diagnose, treat, and the position that the treatment step needs a system that holds the authoritative record and can act on it, with a person who ran the operation deciding what is real. AI proposes, experience disposes.

Camp and crew logistics

The North American name for managing workforce travel and camp accommodation as one job: rosters, flights, buses, rooms and manifests for a remote site. It is the operational half of workforce aviation logistics; the governing half (policy as the economic instrument, approval and claim control) is what the category adds. See what the discipline is called elsewhere.

Crew logistics (crew travel)

The UK North Sea and North American offshore term for moving crews to and from offshore assets end to end: check-in, helicopter or vessel, and the return. Emphasises the movement; the policy that decides who travels sits beside it. See what the discipline is called elsewhere.

Field crew travel

The US contractor term (construction, fibre, pipeline, utilities, energy) for tracking and lodging mobile crews that move between job sites. Emphasises lodging and traveller tracking rather than seat allocation. See what the discipline is called elsewhere.

Personnel logistics

The offshore oil and gas term (Norway, Qatar, Canada East) for moving personnel on and off installations, with persons-on-board tracking, mustering and crew rotation. Emphasises safety-critical headcount on the asset. See what the discipline is called elsewhere.

People logistics

A vendor term, used in Australia and by enterprise logistics suppliers, for moving people with the same discipline applied to freight: schedules, capacity and manifests. Emphasises throughput. See what the discipline is called elsewhere.

Human logistics

A Canadian vendor term for treating travel, camp and rosters as one problem for a rotational workforce. The closest neighbour to workforce aviation logistics; it governs movement rather than movement and money. See what the discipline is called elsewhere.

Workforce logistics

The supply-chain framing of workforce movement, used by energy and resources vendors in Canada and Australia: the workforce is the thing being moved to the point of work. Emphasises planning and mobilisation. See what the discipline is called elsewhere.

DIDO and BIBO

Drive-in drive-out and bus-in bus-out: the road versions of FIFO, common in Australian coal and construction and written into enterprise agreements. The same policy questions apply, with seats on buses instead of aircraft. See what the discipline is called elsewhere.

Workforce mobilisation (mobilisation and demobilisation)

Moving a project workforce to site at the start of a project and home at the end, used in Australian resources and global energy staffing. Emphasises the surge at each end of a project rather than the steady rotation between. See what the discipline is called elsewhere.

Remote workforce travel

The Canadian term for travel plus accommodation for workers at remote sites, typically the oil sands, mines and construction camps of Alberta. Emphasises the journey and the bed together. See what the discipline is called elsewhere.

Crew change

The rotation of a vessel's crew between shore and ship: crew signing off are moved home and their reliefs moved aboard — typically a flight to the port, a crew boat or helicopter to the vessel, and ground transport at either end. In workforce aviation logistics it is the marine rotation: a fixed sailing with a fixed number of seats, rationed by priority and quota rather than by fare. The governed version is set out on the crew change logistics page.

Sail period

A named window in a vessel operation's calendar — a rotation cycle, a season, or a holiday period — against which quotas and booking rules are scoped. The published policy schema labels sail periods so that quotas can apply per sector and per peak or off-peak sailing rather than only per year.

Peak sailing

A sailing during a period the operation has defined as peak — end-of-rotation and holiday sailings, where demand concentrates. Because peak-period capacity is what a marine rotation runs short of, quotas can cap bookings per peak sailing, and the operation defines what counts as peak in its own policy rather than inheriting a fixed calendar.

Wet lease and dry lease

A wet lease provides an aircraft together with crew, maintenance, and insurance; a dry lease provides the aircraft only, with the operator supplying its own crew. Both arrangements put the cost of the seat on the organisation.

Priority matrix

A priority matrix maps each passenger type and trip reason to a priority level, so a booking engine can rank competing requests for the same seat consistently.

Seat allocation

Seat allocation is the rule that ties travel groups to the trips and routes they are permitted to book, reserving capacity for the movements that matter most.

Quota

A quota is a cap on how much a person, group, or trip reason can book within a period, used to share limited capacity fairly rather than first-come, first-served. Quotas typically reset on a fixed cycle, and excess quota can sometimes be lent to a colleague who needs to travel.

Booking window

A booking window is the period before departure in which a given traveller or trip type is allowed to book, used to stage demand and protect seats for higher-priority movements until closer to the date.

Salary-group access entitlement

A salary-group access entitlement grants a travel privilege — such as a cabin, route, or accommodation tier — based on an employee's grade or band, rather than on price.

Displacement (offload)

Displacement, or offload, is the rule that decides who is removed from a full flight or vessel so a higher-priority traveller can board. A clear displacement rule turns an overbooked asset into a fair, auditable decision.

Sector restriction

A sector restriction controls movement over specific legs or routes so that essential personnel can travel without being blocked, balancing operational continuity against capacity limits. It is common where a single leg is the bottleneck for an entire site's staffing.

No-show

A no-show is a booked traveller who does not present for departure. On owned or leased transport it is a direct loss: the seat is paid for whether or not it is used, and it was denied to someone else who could have travelled. See also no-shows, go-shows, and the cost of empty seats.

Go-show

A go-show is a prepared traveller who takes a seat freed up by a cancellation or no-show, often minutes before departure. Go-shows convert capacity that would have flown empty into a completed trip, and depend on the system knowing the instant a seat opens.

Penalty points

Penalty points are a score applied for no-shows, late cancellations, or changes, scaled by how close to departure they occur, so that a last-minute no-show costs more than an early cancellation and disruptive behaviour carries proportionate consequences.

Ban (versus block)

A ban temporarily suspends a booker after repeated penalties, but still allows another traveller to book on their behalf — so essential travel continues while the behaviour is corrected. This differs from a hard block, which stops the travel outright and can strand someone who needs to move.

Asset utilisation

Asset utilisation is the share of available seats or capacity that is actually used. Because the cost of a leased aircraft, vessel, or vehicle is committed regardless of occupancy, raising utilisation — for example from a 40% industry average to 90% — directly recovers money already spent. The figures and the levers behind them are set out in the leased fleet travel benchmarks.

Deterministic policy engine

A deterministic policy engine applies a policy to a booking request and returns the same allow-or-deny decision every time for the same inputs, with no AI guessing at booking time. Because it is deterministic, every decision can be audited and explained in plain English.

Machine-readable policy

A machine-readable policy expresses travel rules as structured data, such as JSON, rather than prose, so a booking engine can execute them directly and a human-readable document can be generated from the same file.

Operational ontology

An operational ontology is a structured, machine-readable model of an operation — its passenger types, trip reasons, assets, entitlements, and rules — that a policy engine can execute directly. It is the contract between natural-language policy and executable logic, and every decision made against it can be traced to the rule that caused it. In UnityTrip a booking is a projection of the ontology; see the API and ontology reference. The free Leased Travel Policy Builder produces one.

Event stream

An event stream is the ordered, immutable record of everything that happens in a system — every booking, change, approval, and claim captured as an event at the moment it occurs. Downstream processes react in real time rather than on a batch cycle, and the stream doubles as a complete audit trail of the operation.

Manifest

A manifest is the live list of who is booked on a specific service. A booking engine checks each request against the manifest and current state — quota used, active bans, seats remaining — before allowing or denying a booking.

Booking engine

A booking engine is the system that takes a travel request and confirms or refuses it against availability and policy. For owned and leased transport it must also account for the organisation's own assets.

FIFO (fly-in fly-out)

FIFO, or fly-in fly-out, is a workforce model in which staff are flown to a remote site for a set rotation and home again. FIFO travel is schedule-driven, repetitive, and tied to rosters, so a single missed connection can leave a shift uncovered.

Rotational travel

Rotational travel follows a fixed roster of work and leave, so bookings are predictable but unforgiving. The system has to align travel to the roster and recover quickly when weather, delays, or operational changes break the plan.

Workforce aviation logistics

Workforce aviation logistics is the discipline of moving a workforce on aircraft an organisation owns, leases, or charters — scheduled private inventory, seat allocation under entitlement and quota rules, no-show and go-show handling, and cost attribution for seats that carry no fare. The category answers to many names: FIFO travel, FIFO workforce logistics, camp and crew logistics, rotational travel, personnel logistics, people logistics, human logistics, crew change, and workforce airlift — the travel half of workforce logistics. Its closest established ancestor is the airline staff-travel system — entitlements, standby, and quotas — generalised to any organisation's own transport.

Zero-dollar travel

Zero-dollar travel is travel with no fare and no employee reimbursement: the organisation allocates a seat on transport it already pays for. Because spend cannot ration demand, control shifts from reimbursement to entitlement — priority, quotas, booking windows, and penalties — and because the seat is valued at zero, this travel appears in no conventional spend report until service fails. The unmanaged-spend review measures how much of it an organisation carries.

Duty of care

Duty of care is an organisation's obligation to protect the safety of travelling staff. It depends on knowing where people are in real time and being able to reach them.

Journey management

Journey management is the practice of assessing and controlling the risk of a specific trip in advance — route, timing, and precautions — common in energy, mining, and humanitarian operations.