Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-11-17 19:05:34 - Graham Ellis
Fair and simple
We welcome customers at our training centre on public and private courses. If they ask us to present our courses at their offices, we're very happy to do so, but we do charge them the additional expense this puts us to - basically travel and accommodation. Naturally, they want a fixed price quote for this ahead of time (no-one likes placing an order for an "open" amount), and for a number of years we've operated a scheme based on travel at x p per mile and overnight expenses at y pounds per night I'm staying away.
It's a simple scheme, and it averages out so that the money we charge is usually about the same as the expenses - in other words, we don't look to make any profit on it. Fair? Well - it was fair 2 or 3 years ago, but hotel prices in London have been creeping up, car parking there is expensive, and there's also the congestion charge. And that means that our scheme has become less fair - it means that if we raise expenses across the board, our "provincial" customers will be subsidising our "capital" ones.
So - a moral dilemma - keep it simple, or sacrifice some simplicity to keep it fair.
All London courses confirmed after 1st January 2005 will be subject to a higher "overnight" expense charge - an extra 30 pounds per day - and our non-London course prices (and expenses) will remain unaltered.
Worked Example - Visit the web site of a typical hotel chain - I'm in London at a Travel Inn this week (King's Cross) at 83 pounds per night; I was at their Nuneaton hotel a fortnight ago, and there the charge was just 46 pounds per night. I can park, eat and pay for internet / phone on the change from 95 pounds in Nuneaton, but not in London.