If you are a frequent business traveler, you won’t be looking for business travel tips. Neither will you be looking for the benefits of business travel. There aren’t many. Except for the frequent traveler programs points. And there are almost no benefits to your health.
So the list below is not made of business travel tips. Rather business travel pains. They can be funny if you take them with a pinch of salt. If you are a frequent business traveler, you’ll understand the sarcasm behind.
You will find neither a list of the 14 best business travel gadgets (you know them all too well) nor the best business travel luggage. The 14 things that only a frequent business traveler understands were written to elicit a smile from your side and also give them material to show their less frequent business traveler friends and family who still think that the phrase “He is on business trip” (or she is on business trip, when they are actually just traveling for work) sounds glamorous.
14 Things Only a Frequent Business Traveler Understands
1. You can pack a one-week suitcase in 15 minutes max without a “business trip packing list”.
Yes, there are people who search for those lists. And Google has 1,820,000 results for how to pack for business travel. None of those who searched was a real business traveler.
By now, more than half of your business travel luggage is pre-packed.
2. You might end up eating the three main meals of the day in three different countries.
It goes like this: breakfast at the Paris CDG airport, lunch with your colleagues in Geneva and room-service dinner by yourself at the hotel in Vienna. Or some other random combination of countries. Just one of the benefits of business travel: sampling international cuisine.
3. You have visited the top 10 tourist destinations for city travel but you only know the airport, the hotel, and the office.
For example, Paris. Or my favorite, Brussels. Oh, the joys of a business traveler!Â
4. As a frequent business traveler, you may have a panic moment when you wake up in the morning because you can’t remember where you are (and that’s not because of too much to drink at the business meal the night before).
See number 2 above. The funny part is that you never think about being at home (considering how much you travel, the probability of actually being at home is very, very, but very small).
5. For holidays, instead of traveling you are happy to stay at home.
There is a word for this. It’s called staycation. It doesn’t sound nice but it feels good.
And, of course, you can’t understand anymore what makes people so happy about travel. For you, it’s only work.
6. When you travel for leisure you are at first happy because of how light you feel until you start worrying, imagining that you have lost your notebook.
To be precise, you have a panic attack.
7. Your work week really begins on Sunday afternoon when you start stressing about getting ready for leaving and worrying about making it on time to the airport the next morning (very early usually).
And you are not even aware of the stress state in which you spend three-quarters of your day. Whoever had the idea of saying Sunday Funday?! You can’t remember when was the last time you had fun on a Sunday.
8. You don’t know if you should be happy or sad about the fact that you are a VIP member of the major airlines and hotel chains fidelity programs.
Oh, here are some of the benefits of business travel! And you should be rather happy, right? Because you’ll be able to use the points during the holidays that you prefer spending at home. See point 5 above. On the other hand, you haven’t paid for a holiday in quite a while – thanks to your Platinum status for all the frequent traveler programs on the planet.
9. You plan to catch up on sleep during the weekend but the admin stuff you left at home catches up on you instead.
You know it won’t happen, but you keep planning. Hope dies last, as they say. And stress accumulates.
10. You gave up explaining your family and friends that business travel is not at all as glamorous as they think (it won’t change their minds anyway, so why bother).
Oh, what a fantastic thing it must be to be able to work and see the world at the same time. No, it’s not! And you don’t “see the world”! You only see the office in different parts of the world.
11. Your Google search statistics have on top position things like flights to Granada, dijon hotels, Air France Economy review or Chisinau hotels (for those traveling to more exotic destinations).
12. You are the most trusted source for best travel products reviews.
13. Your friends (those who still remember how you look like) don’t have any problems finding the perfect gift for you. They just need to search for best gifts for business travelers.
14. You know by heart all the best hotel chains for business travelers and the best rental car companies for business travelers.
What would you add? What have we missed?
A little disclaimer for the non-business travelers who read this: it’s great to travel for work. But as with any other things in life, when it’s too much its beauty fades a little.
There are also many benefits when traveling for work. One that I appreciate the most: when you travel for business you open to the world and to different cultures in a more profound way then when you travel for leisure.
Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
-Ibn Battutah, The Travels of Ibn Battutah
Busines travel might not leave you speechless, but you’ll surely end up with some good stories to tell.
