Personal vs. Business Travel: Analysis
 

Wow - we do even more flying than I had realized! And a surprising amount of that is personal travel, despite my definition!!

We had 47 responses, ranging from 6,000 total paid 1999 miles to 260,000 (the "Get-a-Life" Award?). My definition of "Business" (paid for by employer, or otherwise tax deducted) skewed the results somewhat towards business travel, since several responses indicated they manage to have at least a little fun on "business" trips (and sometimes a lot of fun!). And I've purposely omitted award travel, since that varies considerably from year to year as well as how we use it (upgrades vs. tickets).

I was surprised by the overall level of personal travel (especially given my skewed definition): over a quarter us exceed 75% personal travel, averaging more than 60,000 personal miles per year (counting just those who are primarily personal travelers). And counting everybody, 30-40% of our travel is personal (depending on how you do the averaging). That's a lot of personal travel!

Averages for 47 responses
99,200 Total miles (range 6,000 to 260,000)
69,200 Business (range 0 to 209,000)
29,600 Personal (range 0 to 130,000)

Even though 70% of our miles are business, the average individual was 60% business (i.e., the mega-flyers, who tend to travel more on business, skew the average miles).

Medians (that is, response #24 when sorted) were roughly similar, except that personal travel was only 20,000 - lots of very low personal travelers (partly the result of my definition of "business"), but the average is brought up by the few of us who do lots of personal travel.

Here is a general distribution table by % personal travel; it shows that most of us are skewed one way or the other (no comment!):

Total............Personal Travel Proportion
Miles.......#.....<1/3...1/3-2/3...2/3+
<25K........2........0.......0..........2
25-49K.....6........1.......2..........3
50-74K.....8........4.......1..........3
75-99K.....7........5.......1..........1
100-149K.17......12.......1..........4
>150K......7........7.......0..........0

Total......47......29.......5..........13

[This message has been edited by johna (edited 01-15-2000).]

johna: Have you thought of sending in this information to Randy and the Inside FLyer folks? there might be a brief mention in the magazine for a future issue.

For all of that work, you should be published.

Interesting analysis.

Hopefully you were able to use flight time (or better yet, down time in the airport) to do all that # crunching.

Most interesting stuff! Particularly when it involves people we know!

Thanks johna for taking the time to crunch out the numbers. I think Catman has a good suggestion, and I'll bet the airlines would love to have something like this for their passengers.