A corporate travel policy may stipulate that travelers must purchase the ‘lowest logical fare’ to reduce unnecessary expenditure. It’s often required that employees purchase the cheapest available route. That routing may include additional legs to the journey if it is significantly cheaper than a direct, point-to-point, routing.
The company’s travel manager will set the parameters for an acceptable trade-off between cost and total travel time.
More recently, unbundling of airfares has seen sharp increases in ancillary costs either in advance of travel or at the airport. This makes it difficult to benchmark ‘apples-to-apples’ and ensure that what may appear to be the lowest logical is just that.
There are additional components that are now being included as part of what the lowest logical policy incorporates such as loss of productivity on aircraft without Wi-Fi, power points, or seat pitch.
