[Anonymous]

[Jane]

I’ve recently being doing quite a bit of business travel for the first time in my career, and I have to say I find it quite irritating that I head off to some fabulous destinations (New York, Paris, etc), and hardly have any time to experience them when I’m there.

Do others find the whole experience of business travel inspires them to go back to the destination for leisure? What are the places that draw back the most visitors – the far-flung eastern destinations, with foreign cultures and strange traditions; or places much closer to home in Europe; or places much more similar to home, for instance in America or perhaps Japan?

[wishee71]

If you continue to travel you will become more savvy to being able to include a weekend here and there whilst saving your company money by including a Saturday night! I have travelled extensively, and granted it was easier before a family came along, I used to try and add a weekend to the end or start of my trip. Particularly if it was somewhere I was unlikely to visit anytime soon again. Enjoy, I could never be desk bound.

[BABenji]

welcome to the wonderful world of international business travel. at first it’s novel, then it’s a pain, then you start learning a routine in the places you visit often (which hotels are the best, restaurants, telling the cabbie which way to go so you don’t get ripped off), then you start obsessing about hotel points and miles so you can bring your other half back to the places you love the most. embrace it, enjoy it and use your company’s £££ to make the mistakes you would make with your own money so you don’t have to when you go back!

[Inquisitive]

Even in business trip, you could test the life of a city. Some points I usually follow: i) for long haul, try to reach in the morning hours – in this way, I get a good sleep in the plane and get a fairly good time to expore the city (assuming I do not have to work on same day or arrive on Sunday). There are many tips in internet for exploring a city in 4 hours/8hours/1 day. In this way, there will be some tiredness, that will help a good night sleep and less jet lag next working day. ii) many cities offer very good ‘tourist experience’ after office hours. The city center plaza is best bet. There are some museum open late. In Singapore, one could enjoy a night zoo. The hotel concierge shall be able to help, iii) if there is absolutely no time, I normally take a taxi and request him to make a round that is possible witin $50 and show me the interesting places from outside – at least I could see the city and some architectural theme. Only problem is in some city $50 does not take too far.

[Travelforus]

Even with only a free evening, you can often ‘get a feel’ for a city by going out for dinner and walking around afterwards (this, of course, assumes that you are in a city where it is safe to walk around the streets at night).

Airline magazines are often a good last minute source of “24 hours in” – type recommendations, especially if you are flying to an airline’s home base.

[VintageKrug]

I seem to manage to see one or two tourist things on most of my business trips

There are some places where work commitments mean you simply don’t have a moment to spare.

But at the very least stopping over allows you to form an initial impression of a place, decide whether a further visit is a good idea

Even a short stopover allows you to get a feel for the geography and better understand where you might prefer to stay and what you might like to do when/if you return.

[Author]

Posts