macabus

I've burned through almost a million *A miles this year on F awards throughout the world, and have another 750,000 to go until I'm at a comfortable level given the current economic situation.

I'd rather worry about getting more miles than regretting not using them when I had the opportunity.

iahphx

It's interesting how few folks responding to this post have changed their behavior.

Wall Street (which obviously isn't infallible, look at the insane gyrations in oil prices the past year) is CONVINCED that air travel demand is about to fall off a cliff. AirTran, for example -- which several analysts believe could be quite profitable next year at current fuel prices -- has a market capitalization of only 1/10th its annual sales.

So either you guys are going to travel a lot less next year, or Wall St. is nuts.

gj83

What's going on, at least at my company, is that we had some attrition that wasn't replaced and we picked up the slack by going from ~80% travel to around 90% travel. The level of work has risen to a place where we are trying to hire on a new person and have been trying for several months but haven't been successful. The math for my department: lose 3, add 1 so still 2 down over our norms.

In other words we have fewer people traveling, but those who do travel much more.

I think my industry is shrinking since our second largest competitor keeps bleeding people to us. They will probably not be around too much longer at this rate. That leaves a duopoly in our market sector and cuts those people out of travel.

The street is right and we are right.

glex50

Yes, affecting business in a negative way, for the moment. Other units in my company are growing though and do not feel a recession; they're likely to see an increase in their travel budget.

But the net effect on personal may be positive as the economy turns south and fares are contained vs. where they were going 3 months ago.

macabus

A great deal of anecdotal evidence points to 4th quarter results being so abysmal that the corporate world will be shell-shocked.

Travel will become an unrecognizable beast.

BLG

Hasn't affected my travel significantly. Have about a half million BA and AA miles to work through. Right now primary constraint on leisure travel is time. Business travel has not been effected. Hard to know what the future will bring. But -- we are going into unknown financial territory -- can't say how things might change if all world's economies fall off the cliff. I doubt it, but can't rule it out. FWIW, just flew LAX-LHR in CW yesterday and First and CW were full.

PhlyingRPh

I've been continuing with my award winning stockmarket strategy of buy high sell low for over 20 years now, and really, the amount of leisure and business travel I do just keeps going up!

MarqFlyer

Not denying that business is struggling. But as others have said, the pinch sometimes means that those who do travel, travel more.

In my case, I work as an in-house attorney. Budgets are tight, which means that I have less to spend on outside counsel to help me out. When I don't have that outside help, I often have to travel more to get the work done on my own. This usually saves money for my employer, but also means that my hours go up. I suspect this will continue for the foreseeable future.

As for Wall St. projecting less flying demand overall, they might be right. While many frequent fliers here are flying more often, I suspect there may be fewer of us. And leisure travel will likely suffer, especially among those whose personal finances have been more highly leveraged.

callie-girl

No change as yet and no change for the foreseeable future.

It's not that the market is so grand or steady, it's that our travel is required for the next 4 1/2 years, so for now, the rate stays the same.

I do a little more shopping for price and time, but same amount of time gone, same number of trips.

IsleOfMan

I haven't seen any trips canceled, but trips that are in the planning stage are requiring more justification. In terms of personal travel, I'm using more awards as opposed to chasing miles. My threshold of cost/mile is staying roughly the same, it's just fares that are increasing. I'm also being more prudent in looking for "saver/stretcher" awards, especially at hotels, even if it may add some minor level of inconvenience (i.e. a 45 min drive instead of 15 min... a Hampton instead of a Hilton).

lalala

All of our travel that is not operational has been curtailed because of the U.S. gov't CR. That is, if you are planning on standing in front of a poster in Honolulu for a one hour poster session, you are not so likely to get authorization to go to your meeting.

However, if you are a meeting organizer or a session chair, you are cleared to go.

Other meetings are just being webexed and live meetinged.

hauteboy

Pretty much all travel has been canceled at my company, even essential travel is now economy only. (My boss just returned from India R/T in ECON).

Personally, yeah will probably be affected as my travel budget comes out of dividends from my mutual funds.
Then again, the recent currency fluctuations have made doing a RTW feasible again.

Redhead

In normal times I would agree. However, I work in financial services. While (knock wood) right now I feel somewhat secure in my job, if the downturn continues I could be out of work. I'm cutting all extraneous expenses and socking enough away in safe instruments to be able to pay my mortgage and living expenses for a year. I normally have 6 months living expenses in liquid assets, but I know plenty of people in my industry who have been out 6+ months.

KTW

Not at all. I still travel to LAS at least once a month ^

Marathon Man

what meltdown? I took everything out in Jan 08 and put it all in a Citi Ultimate savings acct earning 3.5%

Either that, or it's retirement money that'll eventually go back up and we use miles to travel anyway so it matters not.

my suggestion to those who think the whole shootin' match is gonna get really worse:

book a few future planned trips now using awards and points. That way, should the airlines one day figure out how to use the crisis as a way to craftily end or seriously curtail already highly restricted and ever changing award programs, you already got your 'paid' tickets set up. Plus, if it's really gonna head south, travel is about the only thing left to do til things get back up again. Much like if you get dumped by someone... I used to tell friends to keep some money or miles aside for a trip to say, Fiji in case the hottie they were dating took off one day. It happened to me once and I recovered on a nice trip to Amsterdam with friends