An offsite budget has two kinds of line. Some are set by the city and the dates: the venue, the nightly hotel rate, group meals, activities. Others are set by how people get there: airfare, travel time, the hotel nights around arrival and departure, and the contingency for a missed flight. The second kind changes with the number of offices that can fly nonstop (no change of plane) to the city, and that number is the one Midway’s route data gives you.
This page lists the line items, says what each one depends on, and works through one team of five offices across four candidate cities, with route data as of 24 October 2026. It gives no amounts. Midway has the cheapest direct fare per office and nothing on hotels, venues or connecting fares, so the amounts come from your own quotes. For the airfare line itself, the offsite flight cost method has the arithmetic.
See every city Portland, Minneapolis, Raleigh-Durham, Phoenix and Dublin all reach nonstop
Offsite budget line items
What each line depends on
| Line item | Set by | Changes with nonstop access |
|---|---|---|
| Airfare | Headcount per office, fare per office | Yes. A nonstop fare is a lookup, a connecting fare is a quote |
| Travel time | Flight time per office, layovers | Yes |
| Arrival and departure nights | Who can reach the opening session and get home after the close | Yes |
| Travel-day meals | Days on the road per person | Yes, through the number of travel days |
| Airport transfers | Number of arrival waves, airport used | Partly |
| Contingency | Number of flight legs, rebooking exposure | Yes |
| Entry documents | Passports on the team, destination country | Only when someone crosses a border |
| Hotel nightly rate | City, season, size of the room block | No |
| Venue and meeting space | City, dates, group size | No |
| Group meals and activities | City, programme | No |
Hotel appears on both sides. The number of room-nights depends on flights, because an office that cannot arrive in time for the opening session needs a night before it. The rate per night depends on the city. Keeping the two apart on the sheet makes it clear which part a different city would change.
Travel time is not an invoice, and it is still a cost. The offsite pillar guide prices it at a loaded hourly rate. Whether finance counts it is a policy choice, but it belongs on the sheet as hours per office, so a city that saves money and costs a working day is visible as such.
Five offices, four candidate cities
The example team has offices in Portland, Minneapolis, Raleigh-Durham, Phoenix and Dublin (PDX, MSP, RDU, PHX, DUB). Around 20 destinations have a nonstop from all five airports in at least one month of the next twelve, and 11 in February 2027, the lowest month. The four cities below run from full nonstop coverage to almost none.
| City | Offices with a nonstop | Offices that connect | Longest nonstop flight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago O’Hare | 5 of 5, all year | None | Dublin, 8h00 |
| Denver | 4 of 5, all year | Dublin | Raleigh-Durham, 4h00 |
| New Orleans | 3 of 5, seasonal | Portland, Dublin | Phoenix, 3h00 |
| Charleston | 1 of 5, all year | Portland, Raleigh-Durham, Phoenix, Dublin | Minneapolis, 2h50 |
Flight times are the shortest scheduled nonstop over the next twelve months, rounded to 5 minutes. Midway route data as of 24 October 2026.
Chicago O’Hare. Every office flies nonstop, every month. Each airfare line can be read off Midway’s table, where Kayak has a price for that route, and the longest US flight is Portland at 4h00. The Dublin office is the only one with a long flight, 8h00, and the flight cost guide already recommends an extra hotel night for anyone crossing more than three time zones. So the arrival-night line probably covers one office.
Denver. The four US offices fly nonstop all year, at no more than 4h00 from Raleigh-Durham. Dublin has no nonstop to Denver in the data. Its line changes in four places at once: the airfare becomes a quote for a two-flight trip, the travel time gains a layover Midway cannot time, the arrival night becomes close to certain, and the contingency line now covers a missed connection.
New Orleans. Minneapolis flies nonstop all year. Raleigh-Durham’s nonstop runs from October to May and Phoenix’s from October to August, so a June offsite has two nonstop offices and a September one has one. Portland and Dublin connect in every month. The share of the budget that is quoted rather than looked up depends on the month you pick.
Charleston. Only Minneapolis has a nonstop, at 2h50. Four offices connect, so four of the five airfare lines are quotes, and every one of them carries a layover and a missed-connection risk. Charleston may still be the right city. It is the one where the flight-dependent half of the budget is hardest to estimate before booking.
Month matters even for a city on the shared list. Nashville has a nonstop from all five airports, but the Portland flight runs in October and from April to September. A Nashville offsite between November and March turns the Portland office into a connecting line.
Which lines a connection adds
Each office that connects adds the same set of entries, whatever its size:
- a separate fare quote, since Midway shows the cheapest direct round-trip only
- layover hours, which the route data does not have
- a likely arrival night, if the two flights cannot land before the opening session
- a travel-day meal on each side
- a contingency entry for a missed connection or a rebooking
Airfare and hotel nights scale with the office’s headcount. The quoting work scales with the number of connecting offices. So a city where one large office connects and a city where three small ones connect can cost about the same in fares and very differently in planning effort. The guide to direct flights versus connections covers how to decide which office connects. This page only counts what the decision adds to the sheet.
See which cities all five offices reach nonstop in the month you plan to travel
Lines set by the city
The nightly hotel rate, the venue, group meals and activities do not move with flight access. They come from quotes for your dates and group size. For a US city, the GSA per diem lookup gives the federal lodging and meals rates by city for fiscal year 2027, which some finance teams use as a ceiling or a sanity check. Rates for cities outside the US are set by the Department of State.
Airport transfers sit between the two groups. The cost per ride depends on the city and the distance from the airport to the hotel. The number of rides depends on how spread out the arrivals are, and an office that connects is more likely to land on its own. A group transfer is only worth booking for flights that land close together, which the route data cannot tell you, because it has no departure times.
Building the budget sheet
- List the offices with headcount per departure airport.
- Run the nonstop search for the month of the offsite, not for the year.
- For each candidate city, mark each office as nonstop or connecting.
- Fill the nonstop offices’ airfare from Midway’s table, using the flight cost method and its buffer.
- For each connecting office, add a fare quote, an arrival night, layover hours and a contingency entry.
- Add the city lines from the hotel and venue quotes.
Run the whole sheet for two or three cities at once. Side by side, it shows which lines the choice of city moves, and the flight lines are the ones the route data can fill in.
Limits of the route data
Midway’s route data covers the 600 busiest airports in the world over the next twelve months. It lists nonstop flights, their scheduled duration and the months each one runs. It has no departure times, layovers, connecting fares, hotel rates or venue prices, and the fare it shows is the cheapest direct round-trip from Kayak’s search data, which can be missing for a low-traffic route. (Midway earns a commission on flights booked through those links.)
Enter your offices’ airports in Midway to see which candidate cities keep every office on a nonstop. Whether an arrival night is needed still depends on the flight schedules for your dates, which you check at booking.