Effective Business Travel Means Keeping Your Options Open!

I have a brilliant co-worker named Lori. Most people spend their free time after work going to the gym, quilting, reading, or raking the leaves. Lori practices Veterinary Medicine, reads French poetry, or cultivates an unbelievable garden. Lori will spend 50 hours per week as a technical trainer for database applications, then you’ll find her surgically operating on the zoo's tiger on a Saturday (he broke a tooth and Lori gave him a new crown). 

If Lori has a weakness; it would lie in her not-so-firm grasp of a traveler's common sense.  Poor Lori recently got beaten up pretty severely by the travel gods, and a lot of it could have been avoided.

Here's the timeline of what happened:

• Lori was scheduled to fly from Minneapolis to Dulles airport in Northern Virginia. Her departure was scheduled for 1:00pm.
• She arrived at the Minneapolis airport, and her flight was cancelled.  The following flight was cancelled, as well.
• Lacking confidence in the last direct flight of the day, she took the option when they offered her a flight that routed her through NYC before arriving at Dulles.

Now, I applauded her for this.  Having been to New York, I was well aware of many travel options to get from NYC to Virginia, so if her connecting flight were to fall through, she would still have options to get to Virginia in time to teach her class the next day. Traveling is mostly all about how you juggle your options. 

Let's rejoin her story:

• Flight delays made her late to JFK in New York City, but fortunately she made it in time for the connection. It turns out that she needn’t have hurried -- her connecting flight was delayed, and delayed again, and ultimately cancelled.
• It was now 9:00pm in New York, 12 hours prior to her commitment to teach a full class of people in Virginia.

At this point, I would have pulled up the Internet and checked the train schedule. "Train?" you ask, "Yes, TRAIN!" I say.  There is an express train from NYC to Washington D.C. that leaves almost every hour.  You can book a one-way business class ticket on that train that will give you a private sitting area with access to the Internet for less than $250 (I checked after I heard her story). 

So, from the JFK airport you could take a cab or subway to Penn Station, then ride the rails to D.C, take the Washington Metro to the West Ferry station, where it’s a five minute cab ride to her hotel.  Lori would have been in bed shortly after the midnight hour.

She was in the "zone" though.  That horrible zone inflicted by the airline whose ineptitude had beaten her up so badly by now that she was floating like a zombie through their procedural maze. Let's read the end of her story:

• The airline sent her to rebook her flight, and then decided instead to bus her the six hours from NYC to Dulles. (Yes, a bus. A stinky, slow diesel bus).  Two hours later, the bus arrived at JFK, and she and her fellow downtrodden travelers all piled on, mindful that her 9a.m. goal was now dashed.
• 4 1/2 hours into the trip the bus broke down. The driver managed to limp into a gas station before making a failed attempt to repair the broken fan belt with bungee cords.
• Finally, Lori decided to jump ship.  She called for a cab, but given the late hour and her location, the cab company didn't believe her story!  Can you blame them?  It took an hour of calling and waiting before a cab was finally dispatched.  After limping around a traffic accident, the cab (and Lori) eventually arrived at her hotel 27 hours after her departure from Minneapolis.

My advice to you, fellow traveler, is to stay aware of where you are and of all of your options. The more important your deadline is, the more options you need to give yourself! Think outside the box. Make sure you have the expense account and assets available to make those quick decisions to step off of your itinerary. Don’t fall into that "zone" where you think that saving $500 is better than saving the business you need to conduct.

EXTRA: If you have questions for Ken regarding business travel, hotels, airplanes, etc, please send him a “Tweet” on his twitter account.  You can also follow Ken on Twitter @foodbreeze!