Yes, YOURS, the business traveller. And mine too as it happens.
I think it’s time for us to stay at home more, because all this travel is long on prestige, luxury and spending – but short on efficiency.
My bona fides first: I’ve spent more than forty years jumping on and off planes, racing to hotels, straining at bad telephone connections, tearing out what little hair I have left over computer malfunctions, constricting my bladder at tedious meetings, and making my jaw ache being polite at social functions with a business purpose.
Maybe then we had to do it, but now I can’t see for the life of me why 75 percent of it is necessary.
A soccer analogy here that I think is relevant. In 2008, at the Euro football championship, BBC’s soccer experts sat in an elegant studio in Vienna with views of marvellous colonnaded buildings.
But the matches themselves were down the road – in Vienna itself, in Klagenfurt, Innsbruck; in Basel, Geneva and Zurich in Switzerland. The panel watched it all on TV.
They could just as easily have done it from Shepherd’s Bush. It’s about symbolism. They felt they had to do their punditry in one of the countries in which it was being played, even if they weren’t actually at the matches.
They didn’t. Only pride and a sense of grandeur made the BBC incur enormous expense so their panel could watch a game on TV in Vienna they could just as easily have watched in London.
A lot of business trips now are no different. I recently went to France to do some property negotiating – and frankly I could have done it all by computer and/or teleconference from London.
With e-mail, videophones and the instant transmission of documents it seems to me less and less necessary to trek out to an airport, go through the nightmare that passes for security, then sit on a plane for hours and hours. Not to mention the expense to the company.
Be honest – isn’t there just a hint of the freebee jolly in a lot of the trips we go on these days? Isn’t the sad truth about us that we rather like the image of ourselves as tired, jet-lagged and hard-pressed businessman as we total up our air-miles and take a breather from strained marriages and fractious kids?
If I hear another executive complain to me about travel as he guzzles down more free champagne and stows the complimentary wash kit in his briefcase I’ll spit out my hors d’oeuvre.
Maybe it was that three and a half hour delay at Montpellier coming back that’s put me in a sour mood – that and the 45 minute wait for the baggage at Gatwick.
But are we all going the way of the dinosaur – and deserve to?
To contact Stuart White please email stuartwhite383@btinternet.com
