Travel Forum / Travel Types / Air Travel / May 2008

Frequent Air travelers eventually go nutty and end up like Kulp.

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The waning days of the road warrior

Current slowdown in business travel may not end when economy recovers

For years, Irv Rothman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard's Financial Services
division, traveled at least once a quarter ‹ top three lieutenants in tow ‹
from his New Jersey base to HP's Silicon Valley headquarters. After enduring
Newark airport hell and six-and-a-half hours of stale, germy air, the team
would arrive, strung out, to meet with their boss. For one hour. Then they
would turn around and do the whole thing all over again.

So far this year, the quartet has made not one pilgrimage to Northern
California. They meet Jon Flaxman, HP's chief administrative officer, over
Halo, HP's hyper-realistic videoconferencing system. They are home in time
for dinner. And they don't care if they ever see Silicon Valley again.

Whenever there's an economic downturn, corporations slash their travel
budgets. The International Air Transport Association is already reporting
that business and first-class travel have experienced the biggest plunge in
five years. Typically, when the economy snaps back, so do the business
trips.

This time, though, certain types of corporate jaunts may be dead for good.
Across the U.S., companies as varied as Advanced Micro Devices, Xerox, Cisco
Systems, AstraZeneca, and Adecco are cutting internal business travel
(grinding from corporate office to office) by as much as 50 percent.

That's not to say all business travel is going extinct. Globalization has
expanded workplace networks exponentially. We all need to collaborate with ‹
and stay connected to ‹ more people than ever. Still, a growing number of
managers are thinking twice before jumping on a plane.

Going green

The super surge in oil prices and resulting spike in airfares is just one
reason companies are ordering their road warriors home. Factor in, too, the
misery of modern air travel, which has de-glamorized the business junket. HR
types also have a new appreciation for how the frequent-flier lifestyle can
wreck executives' health and family lives. And they have come to realize
that jetting off for a one-hour meeting, while instinctual for corporate
strivers, is rarely productive.

Plus, let's not forget that flying less is a great way to burnish a green
image: Companies are racing to cut their carbon footprint ‹ of which air
travel is often a big piece. "What we're trying to do is keep people off the
plane," says Rick Dipper, director of corporate responsibility at Nortel
Networks, which aims to slash internal travel by 50 percent and overall
travel by 25 percent this year. "People are really becoming conscious of the
environmental costs of business travel. That's a sea change that tells me we
are probably not going to go back to where we were."

So, if managers aren't flying to meetings, what are they doing? Using
newfangled technology that is finally delivering the kind of "Star Trek"-y,
space- and time-shifting experiences that tech executives have blabbered on
about forever. Videoconferencing, Web-enabled meetings, online collaboration
tools ‹ all are giving workers the ability to dart around the globe from
their desk chairs.

Take HP's Halo and Cisco's TelePresence technologies, which cost up to
$300,000 a pop. Chief information officers of big companies say the systems
usually pay for themselves within nine months. These machines bear no
resemblance to the grainy, herky-jerky technology of yore. Researchers
studying bodily reactions found that co-workers on different continents
experienced the same chemical responses as they would in face-to-face
meetings.

The new technologies, says Procter & Gamble's chief information officer,
Filippo Passerini, "empower collaboration, so you really can be there
without leaving here. They are saving money and enabling us to collaborate
and innovate faster, smarter, and more sustainably than ever before."

This year accounting firm Grant Thornton's travel and meetings director,
Cheryl Geib, canceled three company offsites, involving 100 executives each,
to cut costs. Geib is replacing them with online, virtual meetings.
Executives are thrilled. "We won't ever go back," says Geib.

Consulting firm BDO Seidman is pushing employees to meet virtually by using
WebEx technology, which lets co-workers across the globe scrawl on
whiteboards and share documents. The company is saving $1 million a year.
"It's not just about travel reduction, it's also about increasing
communication," says the firm's training and development director, MaryEm
Musser. Workplace researchers agree, reporting that huddling with people
more frequently in short bursts of time is more productive than flying off
to long, drawn-out confabs.

How times have changed. Back in the day ‹ say, eight years ago ‹ road
warriors measured status by how many frequent-flier miles they accrued,
their admission to VIP lounges, and all the cool people they met at
conferences. "When you say you were able to have a meeting in London and
then go home and have dinner with your children," says Nortel's Dipper,
"that's what people are jealous of now."