I took my final business trip earlier this week. On Wednesday night I flew back from my last corporate board meeting, capping decades of business travel. Appropriately, my flight home was delayed 4x and I didn’t walk in the door of my house until 12:01am.
I’m a bit of a ‘list person’ and have kept track of all my travel – business & pleasure – back to 1994. That was when I took my first business trip – to Baltimore & Philadelphia to do store checks for MegaCorp.
That trip was exactly 30 years ago and this was my 250th business trip. Those big round numbers seem almost too perfect to finish on – which I’m taking as a sign that my choice to walk away from corporate board work is perfectly timed.
With 250 trips a year for 30 years, I averaged 8.3 trips a year. My peak was 20x in 2008. The farthest I’ve gone on a business trip is 6,797 miles – to Xi’an, China. The place I’ve visited the most is New York City (26x) – mostly for ad agency meetings. Most of my flights were on Northwest/Delta, on which I’ve now topped 600K air miles …
I splurged a bit on this short trip, since it was my finale. I booked the flight in first class, chose executive hotel suite, and valet parked my Jeep. As a corporate officer at MegaCorp, I was allowed to expense all of those perks regularly, but nowadays I don’t typically spend extra money on too many upgrades.
I know people who have travelled exponentially more than I have in my career, but I never wanted to be a real “road warrior”. Throughout my career, I was fortunate to have a lot of control on when, where, and how long I was gone for. That made it all tolerable.
How much did you travel in your career? Still traveling for some kind of work? Miss it?
Image: (c) MrFireStation.com
MrFireStation 
Congrats on closing another chapter. I probably traveled about 5-7 times per year over a 30 year career. I do miss some of the fancy dinners and I always loved waking up early and getting a long walk in before work in a new city.
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Agree – long walks in a new city were always a highlight. I’d love to see some of the bills from those ‘fancy dinners’ too. I’m sure someone back at HQ in accounting was shocked at what was spent!
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In my late twenties I travelled 50,000-80,000 air miles for four years. Most of that included California, to Texas and Louisiana. I also traveled annually to London which made up for Beaumont!
I then traveled a few trips annually until the last few years of my “employed” career when I travelled once per month within California which is seldom more than a one hour flight.
Now in “retirement”, I travel for consulting about six flights per year mostly within California and I consider this travel enjoyment as most of it is only fourteen hours door to door. Actually the first trip that I took in retirement was to Alaska to speak at a conference. That would have been more fun if it had not been in November…..sleet, rain and snow with temperatures between 28 and 34 with 95% humidity.
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Note to self … avoid Alaska unless it’s baseball season! 🙂
That’s true in my home state of MN, too. How many total miles do you think you’ve flown?
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I traveled at least 75K Miles per year was typically American Airlines Platinum Status. Racked up the miles flying to Santiago, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in a single week as a part of covering a sale territory. Also spent a lot of time in Western Canada, and found that the province of Alberta was having the economy of a lifetime extracting oil from oil sands. They actually had negative unemployment. Negative unemployment meant that the province had more jobs than people to work them, so they were very open to increasing productivity. Had trips to NYC and quite a few to Orlando for annual SAP Conventions. Even got in a few trips to Europe. The South America route is by far longest. 16K miles in a week.
Elite status meant that I very often got upgraded to First Class. On flights to the East Coast, AA used wide body planes for cross country flights and an upgrade to Business Class meant getting a sleeper seat. If there were flight delays, I was often given priority getting to where I was going, even if it meant AA switching me to another airline. Took my family on a couple free trips including twice to Europe.
AA got acquired by US Airlines, and the service seemed to degrade to the degree my wife noticed it instantly. They also took the wide bodies with Business Class and sleeper seats out of service for the cross country flights.
I think flying has really continued to degrade since I have retired. Boeing which is badly mismanaged by GE MBA alumni is having real problems building safe, reliable aircraft. There have been numerous IT glitch caused outages, with the recent CrowdStrike caused one which was the root cause behind Delta’s problem. This makes me glad that I am no longer a road warrior. These days I think we would be called road worriers.
Here are four travel hacks I have discovered since retiring. The regional airlines, such American Eagle are flying really nice Embraer jets. They are bigger than the old regional jets and have ample overhead room for stowing your luggage, so no more gate checking. If you are willing to pay a little bit more, they offer first class seats that are close to large plane first class seats and include a light meal and drinks. I had to fly to Omaha from LA last year and taking a Regional Jet lowered my travel time from at least six and half hours to three hours, because the flight was direct.
Don’t rule out discount airlines. If you are willing to pay extra, you can get a first class seat for probably less than economy on one of the name brand airlines. Most of the people who fly these airlines want the cheapest seat possible.
Compare travel times with connector flights against getting off at the major hub and driving the rest of the way. On a trip to Madison and Door County Wisconsin, I flew into O’Hare and hopped in a rental car to drive the rest of the way. The cost was about half flying into either Madison or Appleton, WI. Comparing the total flight time which includes waiting for the connector and driving the rest of the way, the travel time was identical.
Final tip, see if you can still get your corporate rates for the company you retired from. My auto rental company and hotel chain still book my under my old corporate rate. My hotel booking in Madison was about 50% of the cheapest AAA or Senior Rate.
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Good travel hacks! I do the fly to a nearby city and drive a bit. I like to drive and it is a big $ saver.
I love those sleeper seats on long international flights. Trying to figure out how to do that on a trip to Australia in the next few years.
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Congrats on full retirement, Chief. You’ll be able to keep lists of new things you can do now. In my agency career, which spanned five decades, I had innumerable business trips — by foot, car, trains, and planes. My first business flight was to Houston in 1975 on Continental. Many of the airlines I once used are no longer around (several were former clients): PanAm; Braniff, People’s Express; Texas Air; Eastern; Northwest; Continental. I still have over a million miles on Delta, and half that much on American. I haven’t flown since 2020 due to health restrictions. If I can get past those, I still have two continents and 4 states I have yet to visit. Time will tell.
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… and some of my miles were to see you; and some of your miles to see me! My favorite of those was Development Labs in Memphis with Corky’s BBQ & music on Beale Street afterwards. TCB, for sure!
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My total adult travel is likely about one million miles. Like Klaus, I had platinum status with American and routinely was pushed into First Class when even first domestic was decent.
I total my miles as guesstimate as follows:
Annual or multiple trips to Maine to see family which for four years at the end of my parents lives every 90 days over 35 years totals 550,000 miles
Business Travel go go years 300,000 miles.
California travel for business 50,000 miles most being one or two day trips 1,000 miles roundtrip.
International holiday travel 100,000 miles.
This next year will include LAX-Tokyo and Hong Kong-LAX as well at LAX-Lisbon and Barcelona-LAX with a stop in London for four days on the way there.
Days like this week in the market proves Klaus’s dividend strategy
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