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 Extra: Abercrombie CEO grounded!

by Tom Johansmeyer on

When you think about it, $71.8 million in total compensation just isn’t what it used to be. That’s what Abercrombie & Fitch Chairman and CEO Mike Jeffries raked in for 2008. Meanwhile, the company he was skippering showed a profit of $254,000. Basically, A&F as a company – with all the resources available to it – earned the decent salary of a lower-level executive. So, it’s no surprise that Jeffries had his wings clipped.

According to the Corporate Library, a watchdog group, Jeffries was one of the top five Highest Paid Worst Performers of 2008. Translation: never has one received so much for accomplishing so little. I don’t know if you can call it punishment – hell, it doesn’t even feel like a reality check- but A&F is putting the brakes on its contributions to the CEO’s personal travel cost. After $200,000, he has to pick up his own tab. Compare that to the 2008 personal travel bill he turned over to shareholders: $1.3 million.

Yeah, times have changed.

Now, I’m sure someone, somewhere, is about to shed a tear for Jeffries. After all, he’s losing a nice perk. Fortunately, he has found a way to compensate (well, be compensated) for the change in travel policy: A&F is kicking in a $4 million lump-sum payment.

I know it’s fashionable to hate greedy CEOs. Frankly, I’m fine with their making obscene amounts of money, as long as they’re creating kick-ass amounts of shareholder value – that’s really all that matters. Well, Jeffries hasn’t been delivering the goods, which means just about anything is “generous” at this point.

If it had to happen, at least, the cap on personal travel expenses came at the right time. Flights are still pretty cheap, and hotel rates aren’t likely to start recovering until next year.

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.

White Collar Travel: Airline reward programs do it wrong

by Tom Johansmeyer on

It’s always amazed me that airlines reward passengers for the distances they go rather than the outlay of dough. Think back to the mileage run made a few months ago by Gadling‘s esteemed top dog, Grant Martin. He sought the cheapest fare he could find to rack up the miles he needed for the next status level. The upside, of course, was another year of premier treatment, and the dollars he put out were essentially irrelevant. Meanwhile, a business traveler who spent the year dropping a few hundred bucks a week on shorter flights doesn’t get the same level of recognition, despite having spent far more. The airlines take care of the wrong passengers.

A better model for rewarding customer loyalty can be found in the hotel space. It doesn’t matter how many nights you spend in a hotel throughout the year – the points you pick up are based on the money you spend. Yet, frequency isn’t overlooked: you can amass status levels based on how often you stay. So, as long as you’re in a room, you benefit from how often you stay. When it comes to cashing in your points, you are recognized for how much you’ve spent.The doling of points based on your financial value reaches beyond the guestroom, as well. The money you spend in the restaurant, spa, gym and anywhere else translate to points. Meanwhile, the airlines only take into account how long you’ve occupied a seat. It doesn’t reflect your full value to the company.

For the airlines, the upside of a more appropriate award system could be greater than they realize. Even though business travelers rarely spend their own money on tickets, they do decide which airlines they’ll take. So, they control the cash, even if it isn’t their own. By thanking passengers in accordance with the financial commitments they make, the airlines could shift how they distribute their goodwill and turn unwilling passengers into regular fliers … and vocal advocates.