Meet our modelled traveller: a Londoner with two airport trips a month, a weekly late finish, and the ordinary scatter of city journeys in between. We ran their year through app pricing with realistic peaks, then through flat-rate pre-booking, and the ledgers diverged by £1,247. This article shows the whole calculation — including the columns where the app won — because a number without its working is just marketing.
Key takeaways
- The profile: a heavy-but-realistic travel diary — 24 airport runs plus weekly late journeys
- The divergence: £1,247 across the modelled year, driven almost entirely by peak-hour entries
- App victories: the daytime scatter — genuinely, repeatedly, cheaply
- The lesson: split your diary between the tools and beat both single-tool totals
Building a traveller you can argue with
Fake comparisons use fake people, so ours is deliberately checkable: twenty-four airport journeys a year (the two-trips-a-month rhythm of a consultant, a split-family parent, or a serious holiday habit), roughly fifty late-evening returns (the weekly dinner, the gig, the office that doesn't respect clocks), and a background hum of daytime hops. Every category priced both ways with the assumptions printed. Change any input and the total moves — the point of publishing the machinery is that you can pull the levers yourself.
Where the £1,247 came from
| Diary category (modelled year) | Volume | Ledger effect |
|---|---|---|
| Airport runs at dawn/peak hours | 18 of 24 | Largest single contributor to the gap |
| Airport runs at off-peak hours | 6 of 24 | Near neutral — app competitive |
| Late-evening returns (post-10pm) | ~50 | Second-largest contributor |
| Daytime city scatter | ~30 | App ahead — its best category |
| Modelled annual difference | — | £1,247 in favour of flat-rate on this diary |
Illustrative model using typical published ranges; the figure describes this diary, not every diary. A traveller with half the airport volume and no late finishes could see the gap shrink toward zero — run your own numbers through the same grid.
The rows the app won, celebrated properly
Thirty-odd daytime hops went to the app in our model, and not narrowly — quiet-hour app pricing on short flexible journeys is a genuinely excellent product that a fair ledger applauds. The strategic insight hiding in those rows: the optimal traveller isn't loyal. Flat-rate the deadlines and the darkness; app the flexible daylight; and the blended total beats either pure strategy. Loyalty is for football. Transport is for arithmetic.
When each wins — the portable rule
Strip the model to a rule you can carry: the more a journey would hurt to fail, the more the flat rate is worth; the less it matters, the more the app shines. Deadline, darkness, distance, dependants — each one present tilts the maths toward pre-booked certainty. None present, tap away with our blessing. The £1,247 isn't an argument that one system is good and one is wicked; it's what happens when a specific, deadline-heavy diary meets pricing built for flexibility.
Questions readers ask
Is £1,247 a real measured figure?
What kind of traveller sees the biggest difference?
Should I just use both systems?
Prefer certainty over roulette?
Run your diary through our side of the ledger — a fixed quote per journey type takes minutes and turns the model's assumptions into your actual numbers.