Originally Posted by Lucy Kellaway
Anyone hanging around UK airports a week ago would have seen weary businessmen and women in suits standing in queues for hours and then boarding aircraft empty handed. Thanks to the terror alert they had had all their toys taken away and were bravely facing flights without the comfort offered by BlackBerries, mobiles or laptops.
Business travel never made less sense than it did for those few days. And yet did these executives admit defeat? No, mostly they doggedly struggled across the world to give their presentation and attend their meetings regardless.
Why people continued to travel on business last week is a puzzle. Although not as big a puzzle as why they travel on business at all.
If you think about it, business travel is one of the most inefficient, unenjoyable and expensive pastimes imaginable. Off the top of my head I can think of at least a dozen things wrong with it.
It is tiring. It is disorientating. It takes forever to get to the airport. Aircraft are horrible. You eat much too much because you are bored. Your feet swell up. You get jet lag. You do not see your family. Then when you do see them again they are cross with you because they think you have been having a fun time and should now pull your weight. You are shattered and see no reason why you should pull your weight at all.
Business hotels are beastly with their dark wood panels, their overheated, over-airconditioned rooms with ugly curtains and windows that do not open. In them you feel lonely and alienated.
From a work point of view, travel is pointless too. Meeting people and pressing the flesh may be more personal than a video conference, but being personal is not always an advantage. If you have travelled all that way to see someone you will almost certainly have to spend more time with them than you might have liked.
Being away from the office can also be dangerous, even if you are keeping in touch via BlackBerry. If you are not there, people left behind have a way of plotting behind your back.
Yet in spite of all this, the average British executive spends 35 days a year travelling, and most say they will spend even more time doing it next year than this.
So what is it all about? Partly it is a matter of status. It still makes you look and feel important to say: “I’m in Tokyo on Friday, then in Bangalore and Madrid next week.” Travelling a lot makes it look as if you are working really hard too.
I can think of two other advantages: it is nice being handed a glass of champagne by a pretty stewardess. It is even nicer getting air miles – which means you can do some proper travelling for nothing later on.
However, none of these reasons on their own are enough. Instead, there is one big thing that keeps business people orbiting the earth – and that is escape. Business travel can be an escape from home – it means you can sleep for eight hours without being disturbed by young children, and you get a break from the hard emotional graft of family life.
More important, it is an escape from the office. This is what the high-flying executives I know tell me about travel: they do it not because they want to meet people, but because they want to avoid doing so. Office life has become such a dysfunctional mess of meetings and interruptions that the best hope of a decent day’s work is to be found in a metal chamber 30,000ft above the world’s surface.
It is this thought that has given me a brilliant idea that would solve the problem of business travel at one stroke. It is to start a virtual airline: business travel without actually going anywhere. Here is how it would work. The passenger would book into a “flight” of whatever length they liked. Say three hours, seven hours, 13 hours, or whatever suited them. They would then turn up at a convenient, comfortable location in the city where they live. There would be no traffic jams to the airport. No check-ins.
They would quickly be shown their seat (which would be even more comfortable than first class as there would be no weight or space restrictions). They would be strapped into their chair, treated with great respect by a pretty hostess and given a glass of champagne. Then they would put down their table and work. They would only be allowed out of their seats to go to the toilet. They would have their mobiles taken away when they “boarded”. After that it would be proper work only. All the other chairs would be filled with like-minded business people doing the same thing, so there would be peer pressure to keep everyone on task.
At the end of the “flight” they would go to a video-conferencing suite to talk to whoever they needed to meet. Then they could “fly” back home, doing more work on the way back. Or, if they had done all the work on the outward flight, they could skip it and go straight home. Those who like staying in hotels could be put up in a local one; others could spend the night in their own beds.
The saving in costs would be prodigious, as would be the saving in air fuel. There would be no jet lag, no flight delays and no chance of being blown up mid-air.
It would be up to the traveller if they wanted to pretend for status reasons that they were really going to, say, Toyko. But I suspect were this service really to take off (to pick a singularly inappropriate metaphor) it could become something that its users boasted about. “I’m on the virtual to Tokyo tonight,” they would say. For the super successful, super hardworking exec, it could become the only way to fly