I Don't Like Business Travel
 

Whine alert:

The next four weeks, I am traveling for three. Sucks. Puts everything on hold at home.

I know, lots of you travel a lot more, and some of you get shot at where you go. I am a pathetic whiner.

Whine complete.

I do one trip a month and pretty much decide when and where I want to go. I was in Seattle the week before last. It was cold. So I'm rewarding myself and riding my motorcycle to San Diego later this month. I probably have Portland and San Francisco after that, but no more than one a month. I don't like being away from the wife, house, gym and cooking. But I like finding good restaurants, eating and drinking like a viking and expensing it all.

traveling for work gets painful. i lived in hotels for the last few years. that was definitely a contributing factor to switching careers, and i'm much happier being home every night.

Me too.

When I worked for Unilever I used to spend as much money as I possibly could.

I do quite a bit of personal traveling but staying in cheap hotels and camping grounds, plus figuring out bus timetables in foreign languages. So when I have a company expense account I really appreciate clean sheets, a whole bottle of (good wine) and chit chatting with naked women in the sauna.

That was great when I was single. Have a girlfriend at most cities I often travel to. I can't imagine how a married one, with kids, do 50% or more on traveling.

I spent 192 nights in a Marriott last year. Thankfully I had a direct flight almost every week, so I only made 90 something segments with Delta. Yeah, it gets old.

I think the wives think that business travel is like being on vacation.

My wife came with me on my last business trip to Mexico, acting as translator. She learned what happens on a "startup". It is usually a long commute, hotel to site. The hours are long, with lots of nothing happening. Lots of unexpected things happen. When you get back to the hotel, after being gone for 12+ hours, you're generally not in the mood to find anything but the hotel resturant. After dinner, it is finishing up paper work, etc, on the computer and going to bed.

I used to travel 60-70% of the time before I retired, now I hate traveling for vacation.

The best business travel I ever did involved sitting in the left front seat of the airplane. All the other trips? Meh.

I've got over 4 million miles on AA, 2 with Delta + I'm top echelon frequent flyer on most other airlines. It gets old. First 5 years, glamorous (ignorance is bliss) next 20 years its just part of the job.

If you travel first class is not that bad, the problem is when you travel in Monkey Class:(

I didn't mind it until I had kids...I came to loathe it, still do.

I hardly even get any miles out of it, since none of my flights are more than two hours long.

True.

My trips are all the same. Arrive in the evening, sometimes quite late. If on the West Coast, day starts at 5:30 am as usual. If on the East Coast, 7:00 am. At the conference all day, going from room to room, presentations interspersed with meetings, carrying the laptop. Every spare minute, on the laptop watching the market. Conference usually ends at 4 or 5 pm. Back to the hotel, eat something, go through the 200 emails for the day. If a stock acted weird, figure out why. Go through notes from the day, do more work on those stocks, figure out what we're going to trade in the morning. Get to bed around 10 pm. Day starts at 5:30 or 7:00 am tomorrow. Oh, and a call from wife - "did you do any shopping?".

Being Platinum Premier sure is nice isnt it? :)

Try doing it with a business jet and making life A LOT easier.

I hate it. With a passion. I do a lot of "turn and burn" trips, because I would rather be home. For places that are an hour flight away, I've done single day trips - first flight out on SWA, drive to meetings, drive back to airport, last flight back on SWA. I quit doing those after I backed a rental car into a post at the airport (thanks LDW). I actually have done that a few times for west/east trips - red-eye east, meetings all day, last flight back. That's freakin' nuts. I'm too old for 20 hour days. Nowadays it typically is fly east one day, meetings the next (usually first thing in the AM), then last flight back west.

Sucks. But if I don't bring in contracts, my team gets laid off. And most of our customers are on the east coast or in some military base in the middle of nowhere.

Back in the good old days, I used to do out and back day trips to Chicago from LGA. Make three customer visits and be home by midnight. Of course that was when you could walk to the counter at the gate and change to another flight.

My customers think it's glamorous. The only benefits to frequent business travel are the frequent flier miles and hotel points. But like a few of you, I hate traveling for vacations, preferring to just stay locally.

Whenver I can, I take the 911 on a trip. I've driven it to AZ, all over CA, OR, WA, ID and NV.

Traveling for work sucks. But it sucks a great deal less when you're driving a Porsche.

angela

Next couple of weeks Vancouver, BC, Dallas (maybe), San Juan PR, Praque, All will be Coach, except Prague.