White Collar Travel Four barriers to giving up the road warrior lifestyle

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Some people are born for the road. They love getting on a plane every week, enjoy staying in hotels and look forward to the excitement that every new destination will bring. They are the distinct minority. Most have good days and bad, a few hate it, and many, after a while, look to give up the life and move on to something normal. With the demands of business travel – and the jobs that usually put people on planes a lot – it’s natural to want something that puts you in your own bed every night and doesn’t entail work weeks that can last 80 hours (or more).

When many people hear a frequent business traveler complain about the grind, they ask the obvious – and not inappropriate – question, “Why don’t you give it up?” what they don’t realize is that extracting yourself from a travel-heavy job isn’t easy. There are the financial implications, of course. Giving up a job with a major accounting or law firm, for example, can require a pay cut. This may mean making major adjustments that include moving to cheaper digs. These changes don’t happen overnight. It’s tough to have sympathy for people who are making good bank, so this argument tends to fall on deaf ears. The other factors, however, are harder to ignore.

Let’s take a look at four barriers that frequent business travelers have to overcome to get off the road and assume a typical professional (and personal) life.1. The job hunt
Thanks to job sites and cell phones, the early stages of the hunt are easy to address from a hotel room, airport … anywhere, really. But, turning a nibble from an e-mailed resume into a new way of life is a bit more challenging. You need to be able to show up for an interview. After the phone screen comes the face-to-face portion, and freeing up the time to do that can be tricky. Sometimes, you can plan a doctor’s appointment or other reason to stay at home an extra day and use the opportunity for an interview, but a demandin project won’t always allow you the flexibility you need. There are breaks between projects, but that leaves only a small window of opportunity. It can take more than a year for your search to turn into a new gig.

Sometimes, you just have to wait for Lady Luck to step in. The first time I left the road, I had the advantage of a great economic climate and a short travel week (three days instead of five) that left me two days to use for an interview. The one person with whom I needed to interview but couldn’t was fine with a phone interview. If I’d had to go through multiple rounds (which is the norm), I would have been stuck.

2. Comparable work
Depending on the road warrior’s profession, it can be difficult to find similar work that doesn’t involve travel (this can be particularly vexing for consultants and investment bankers). The well-educated, highly talented and experienced professionals that you find in the frequent traveler community can struggle to convince employers that their unique backgrounds satisfy a job description’s specific requirements. When this happens, there’s no alternative but to book another flight and pack your bags.

3. It’s hard to quit the devil you know
For professionals who started their careers in travel-intensive jobs, leaving the road can be scary: they have to turn to a way of life they’ve never known. They don’t know what it’s like to go to the same office every day – commuting is little more than an abstraction. They are unfamiliar with having the same boss all year long and may not be able to grasp what the nature of their work will be like. I remember leaving the road for the first time and having to construct an impression of what it would be like to go to the same desk five days a week – I lasted seven months before I was back in travel-land.

4. The money does matter
If you have a family to support, announcing that you’ll be moving to a smaller house or apartment isn’t always an option. You’re makin a decision that can affect everybody, and even if it works out in the long run, you’ll have to shake everyone’s life up for a while. With school years to consider – and school districts, for that matter – timing is everything. Also, you may have to sell a home and buy our rent another, which isn’t easy to do from the road. The pay cut itself may not be important, but everything that follows from it is.

For those who are still single, it’s much easier to make these changes, but the process still involves plenty of disruption, which is compounded by taking a new job in an environment that is completely alien.

Ultimately, of course, something has to give. Some road warriors save up some extra money so they can quit and live off their savings until they find new jobs. Others are able to find potential employers willing to interview them on weekends. And, there are always those who just stay on the road, figuring that relief will come, well, when it comes.

Read more White Collar Travel here.

Crowne Plaza hotels help business travelers “switch off”

by Scott Carmichael on

Crowne Plaza hotels in Africa, Europe and the Middle East have put together a service designed to help business travelers “switch off” at the end of a long day.

And no, the service does not involve forcing them to hand over their Blackberry – it is not much more than a polite reminder phone call at 7pm telling them that the time has come to put the PDA away and to close the laptop.

Crowne Plaza did some research on business travelers, and discovered that 60% of them struggle to turn their gear off before going to bed. According to the research, 27% of Brits actually take their gadgetry to bed – and will regularly check for messages during the night. Compare that to the Dutch, with just 8% and you’ll understand why 90 per cent of Dutch people claim to be completely relaxed before going to bed versus just 75 per cent across the UK, Germany and Belgium.

The “Switch Off” service is part of the Crowne Plaza SleepAdvantage program. The new sleep services will be introduced at 92 Crowne Plaza hotels in Europe, the Middle East and Africa including 24 across the UK and Ireland by the end of 2010. SleepAdvantage will offer guests luxurious bedding, dedicated quiet zones, a guaranteed wake-up call where you’ll get your call on time – or a full refund of your room price.

White Collar Travel: A Tale of Two Meals

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Business travelers lead dual lives when they’re on the road. One is nothing short of luxurious, and the other is nothing short of depressing. This isn’t a case of good weeks and bad, and there is little they can do to engineer the frequency of the former over the latter. It all comes down to an uncertain mix of luck and timing. The contrast is most evident in the dining experience. Some meals are grand, while others are eaten from a desk, dashboard or on the corner of the bed.

When clients and your own company’s executives are involved, meals tend to be … ummmm … a tad more upscale. The restaurant is chosen with care, and reservations are made in advance. Usually, attention is paid to where in the restaurant you’ll be sitting, with a private room preferred over a meal with the masses. Several choices are evaluated, and the menus are examined for content rather than cost.

Cocktails tend to come before seating, and wine flows abundantly when the party gets to the table. You’ll go through salads and appetizers (and bottles of wine) before enjoying the entrée that you’ve been thinking about all afternoon. By the time dessert arrives, you’re stuffed … but it just looks so good! There’s always room for something sweet, and you eventually return to your hotel room fully satisfied. You start to think, “I really could get used to this.”You wish all your meals could be that tasty, especially on the nights when you experience the other side of your business travel life.

It’s well past 9 PM, and you’re sitting in a conference room with six of your colleagues. The task of the day is projected onto a screen, and the answers just aren’t flowing. Or, you’re faced with a mammoth amount of work, and a deadline is looming. Someone finally realizes that nobody has eaten since breakfast (or the night before, if you prefer sleep to food) and starts taking orders. Fast food fare eventually materializes in the conference room. The smell is a distraction, since the quarters are tight. As you chomp between clicks on the keyboard, you realize that you aren’t tasting a thing. Rather, you’re just trying to fuel up for what is going to be a long night.

Of course, not every meal is taken at the office. In some cases, you may get out at a reasonable hour. But, you’re eating alone, so you need to make your allotted food cash go as far as possible. Occasionally, you’ll treat yourself to something nice, but on other nights you’ll call for a pizza, prop the box on the desk next to your laptop and munch while sifting through your e-mail with a television show you’ve never had time to watch before blathering on in the background.

This is part of the situation to which the business traveler must adapt, of course. Over time, it becomes part of the grind. You can’t call it a routine, because randomness enters into the picture. You get used to it and learn to look forward to the meals you’ll enjoy most.

Read more White Collar Travel here.

White Collar Travel: Hotel Behavior Honed by Habit

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Spend enough time on the road, and your instinct takes over. Soldiers would liken it to their training kicking in. unlike the warriors who protect our way of life, the business traveler’s reflex isn’t intentional. Rather, it evolves from experience and is honed by habit. After a while, you’re “always on” … which is what you want. When a networking opportunity arises – or you get the chance to pick up some competitive intelligence – you want to be ready to pounce.

A friend of mine was headed to Washington, D.C. a few years ago and invited me to tag along. I was involved with a small consulting company at that point and was between projects (which is code for: “I needed one”), so I dashed off with him for a few days. Taking advantage of the status I had with Hilton, I got us a suite on the club level, where we dropped our bags before heading to the lounge.

Again, I had no business plans for this jaunt. But, one of the other people in the lounge atop the Hilton Embassy Row turned to me and asked those four fecund words: “What do you do?” Forgetting my friend, I went from elevator pitch to the intricacies of my company’s style to a friendly game of “mine is bigger” (confession: his was) – standard fare among itinerant white collar folk. It ended with the swapping of cards, though we never spoke to each other again (and knew that we wouldn’t).It didn’t matter that the effort would lead to nothing – I’d suspected the outcome from the start, and I’m sure he did, too. I wound up in character because I couldn’t help it. This one-time trip offered little potential, but my response was driven by years of making connections. If I’d been on a long-term project, I might have seen the guy again in the lounge the next week. Maybe some business would have come from it.

And, my case is not unique. My mentor from an early consulting job once cut himself off mid-sentence when he heard someone at another table mention a competitor’s name. He listened intently for a few minutes before continuing with what he was saying. On planes, of course, we all talk, poke and prod to find a new client or get a sense of what the competition is up to.

The frequent business traveler, after a while, surrenders to the job – sometimes to a caricature of it. It’s only recognized as an occupational hazard years after you’ve given up the life, usually. Until then, it’s like a heartbeat – something the mind-body duality does for you.

White Collar Travel: Don’t judge a business traveler by his mileage account

by Tom Johansmeyer on

There is something incredible about mileage balances that stretch to six digits. The travelers who have them, you suspect, must be the real deal, living entirely on the road. There’s another class of business traveler, however, who is both quite valuable to the airline and is frequently overlooked. They fly domestic, but usually less than 2,000 miles a week. They’ll get short breaks of a few weeks every now and then. As a result, they don’t rack up the miles and miss many of the perks. But, they spend a small fortune over to the airlines every year.

These travelers will never make platinum status – many won’t even see gold. They lose the bragging rights that come with abundant mileage counts but still carry their lives in the bags under their eyes. How do these business travelers get shafted? Let us count the ways …1. Upgrades are rare
They fly all the time but only occasionally find themselves at the front of the plane. To these guys, scoring an exit row seat on the aisle becomes a stroke of good fortune.

2. Vacation dreams vanish
Since they don’t accumulate many miles, these business travelers can’t console themselves with dreams of comp’ed spa treatments in unusual locations. If they pick up enough miles in a year to get an overseas flight, they’ll have to take the perk in coach.

3. They spend more for comfort
Out of pocket, these passengers make purchases to render travel more tolerable. Food, magazines and gadgets become necessary to survival in this weekly grind. Upgrades mean that passengers don’t have to invest as much in their own sanity.

4. They lose bragging rights at the office
It doesn’t sound like much to the uninitiated – and looking back, this activity seems downright idiotic. But, it’s easy to get caught up in the mileage game. The frequent short-haulers lose out, and they hear about it back at the office.

5. They know the airlines don’t care about them
The shorter domestic flights don’t always cost less than the longer ones, but unlike the hotels, airlines don’t reward spending. Instead, they recognize distance. A business traveler flying from New York to Austin every week for a year can spend as much as one running from Boston to San Francisco for the same length of time – maybe even more. But, the benefit will never be the same.