Frequent traveller: False economy

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  • Anonymous
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    Anonymous
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    In which our correspondent tries to rise to his new travel policy, but descends into a rant…

    Like many firms around the world, we have been mourning the painful loss of talented colleagues to redundancy. It has been an upsetting time, made more difficult by the introduction of an excruciatingly mean-spirited travel policy. So I have a new “global” title and role (the old boss had enough, pulled the rip cord and retired) and even greater travel demands just as the new policy bites.

    For starters, flights of under five hours must be in economy. Flying to Germany out of London City on a 60-minute service with no fast-track lane, identical seating and tepid tea – who cares about business class? However, five hours from London takes you most of the way to Abu Dhabi and all the way to Moscow, with Tel Aviv straddling the boundary. Travelling to Israel is four hours and 45 minutes per the schedule and five hours and 15 minutes back, so the ingenious travel department books you into economy on the flight out and business on the way home.

    The new regime has stimulated great creativity in some employees so they can travel business class or stay in a half-decent hotel rather than the park bench or YMCA dormitory the rules dictate. One colleague flew from London to Hamburg via Dubai in business class the whole way just to prove the absurdity of it all, as no one said he had to fly direct.

    I have now also been forced to do Moscow in a day, taking the first flight out and the last one back. That’s eight hours in economy, plus at least four hours in cars (an hour to and from the airport at both ends, although Moscow traffic is possibly the worst in the world). Trust me, the cost savings are real in absolute terms, but time with the client has plummeted, as has the amount of business trips being taken – I dare you to tell me I am wrong as I type this in an empty BA business class cabin to New York JFK.

    What’s more, the travel department insists I use the lowest economy fare, which recently meant Easyjet – something I wouldn’t normally do unless I was with my family and sporting a T-shirt, pair of shorts and at least three days of holiday stubble. So, despite being based in London, I fly BA far less than I would like, and almost never in Europe – which even bothers my wife, since she has greater faith in BA’s maintenance schedule than others, and used to believe me when I said I’d be home at a certain time, 30 minutes before people came round for supper.

    The cheapest economy tickets are great if you have a fixed schedule, but that is not the world in which we live, and certainly not the one my chatty German client inhabits. Our meeting overran and the earliest available flight home on a different carrier was three times as expensive, so my dear travel department made me linger in Dusseldorf airport for three hours for the approved airline’s next service – great after a 5am start.

    So we now travel less, which means less quality time with our clients, and consequently less business. Despite assurances from the IT department, conference calls aren’t a good substitute, and video calls are compounded by controls that are simple to use only if you are the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. Instead, the team has been flying out the night before, staying at a hotel and having a nice dinner – all within travel policy rules and at a cost far greater than the air fare saving. Genius.

    My life now involves sitting in a cramped plastic chair at 35,000 feet, sandwiched between a teething baby being clutched by its mother-earth, knit-your-own-yoghurt parent, and an odour-challenged backpacker on the way home from some spiritual retreat. I am not asking for a throne lined with the soft underbelly fur pluckings of an albino snow-leopard while being fed caviar and Cristal champagne, merely the same standard I would pay for myself if I had to fly for five hours. Travel departments across the world are clearly staffed by unicorns, trolls, elves and fairies, which don’t live in the real world either.


    RichardB
    Participant

    >>For starters, flights of under five hours must be in economy

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