Glossary
Owned, leased, and chartered travel runs on terms that commercial travel never needs — because the seat has no price. These are the concepts that decide who flies, who waits, and who is offloaded when an asset is full.
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, because the seat itself has no price.
You can build one with the free Leased Travel Policy Builder.
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 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. Passenger type, trip reason, and entitlements decide who flies, who waits, and who is offloaded when a flight is full.
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, which is why utilisation and fair allocation matter as much as the booking itself.
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 and transparently. It is the core of a leased travel policy: the table that turns "who matters most on this route" into a rule a machine can apply.
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. It prevents lower-priority demand from consuming seats that essential operations will need.
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.
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.
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. It encodes who is entitled to what, so the booking engine does not have to interpret it case by case.
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 rather than a dispute at the gate.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 genuinely needs to move.
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 roughly 40% industry average toward 90% — directly recovers money already spent.
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, reproduced, and explained in plain English.
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. It removes the gap between a policy that is written and a policy that is enforced.
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.
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, not only commercial inventory, which is the part conventional travel systems treat as out of scope.
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 tightly tied to rosters, so a single missed connection can leave a shift uncovered.
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.
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, which requires an accurate, current view of every itinerary across all transport modes.
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 where a journey can carry real safety risk.
Put the terms to work
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