Originally Posted by
greenpau
So I’ve been giving this a great deal of thought, as apparently we all have.
This year, I will come in at $52k UA PQP - one of the lower side years of my last 13 years as GS (excluding 2020), but high CPM. However, over 13 years I’ve bumped between $50k - $82k consistently. I’m hoping I don’t get tossed to the curb, as I’m early 40s and hope UA can see I’ll likely pump that revenue out in this range for another 20 years. I do think they look at multi-year as a qualification factor, and this is smart thinking for any business - lifetime value of the customer.
On the overall bell curve this year, I turned to company metrics, which mirror the investor conference calls. We are up by 15% in overall UA spend this year, but we are significantly down on a per-head basis. Said another way, we have a larger number of total employees traveling, but for fewer trips per person. Makes sense to me in general - we are doing all-company meetings in place of road warrior travel, so we have a larger number of employees traveling 1-2 trips per year, and the road warrior group is down significantly on number of trips travelled.
What this means for GS this year remains to be seen … but dynamics are certainly different on face value and even what I am seeing on board - larger proportion of leisure premium than ever before.
I'm very much of the same mindset and observation as you are here. For us, we've been trying to slash travel spend as much as we can across the company over 2022/23. We have a very globally distributed team, customer base and business which makes that hard, but we lean very heavily on virtual meetings, etc. now and we've been doing what we can to cut travel.
That said, it's also way up among a smaller group of us across the top of the company as showing up in person has never been more critical to winning in our business and offsetting such a virtual business model. So, same as you, the number of people traveling is way down, but some of our individual spend is way up.
For me, 2022 was $89k and 2023 will land right around $80k +/- $1-2k, and 2024 will likely be the same or more. I'm really curious to see how the GS quals play out this year. For me at $89k in BOS it was a not a concern for me, but my boss (also a former GS) was a no out of Sfo at ~$55k spend last year.