Stormy's Corner

How do you decide if business travel is worth it?

Deciding where to spend my time and money is never easy. I struggle with a number of things when deciding to go on a business trip:

First Air 727-100
Originally uploaded by caribb

• Face-to-face meetings. In today's online, ever connected world, when is face time worth it? It's really hard to measure the importance of meeting face-to-face - it's invaluable. While I have in the past (reluctantly) flown somewhere for a one hour meeting, I tend to try to schedule face-to-face meetings around conferences. The right conferences can allow for lots of planned and impromptu meetings. Actually, at most conferences I go to very few talks - every time I try to go to a talk, I run into someone and next thing I know, the talk is half over.
• Attending talks. Some conferences have tons of great speakers and between the ideas they present and the discussions that happen around them in twitter and on blogs, I learn lots and end up with new ways of thinking about things. But I never travel just to attend talks.
• Giving talks. Being asked to speak at a conference is a tremendous privilege. It's a chance to explain your perspective, your ideas and your thoughts to 20-700 people. That's a huge responsibility, an excellent opportunity and a great privilege.
• Time away from family. I miss the family when I'm gone and I know it's hard on them when I'm on the road. It's especially hard on Frank, my boyfriend, but luckily he's a superdad! Not only does Frank have to do both his household work as well as mine, but the kids are tired because they have to be up extra early. (Frank has an hour commute and starts work at 7:30.)
• Frank's schedule. Frank only travels a few times a year (without me) but those trips are very important to him. Since I travel so much, I try to work around his travel schedule.
• Support. If you are known for something (supporting a project or idea), your presence at a conference or event can help support the event itself. Imagine a Linux event with Linus Torvalds as a keynote. Just the fact that he's there lends support to the conference.
• Costs. To me costs are time - time away from home - as well as the actual money cost of travel.

So while there's no nice formula to apply to any request for travel, conference I want to go to or meeting I want to attend, those are some of the things I consider.

I worked out my travel plans for the rest of the year and here are the events I'll be attending.

• OSiM. GNOME Mobile is an important initiative for GNOME right now.
• Maemo Summit. Right after OSiM - I'm looking forward to learning more about what Nokia and the Maemo community are working on.
• GNOME.Asia. GNOME's first large event in Asia.
• I also have money set aside for one other inter-US trip that I will save for any necessary meetings with existing or potential sponsors.

Here are the events I really wanted to go to, that I won't be able to go to this year. They would have been great opportunities to meet up with people.

• Boston Summit - a GNOME hackfest.
• Encuentro Linux - they are having a GNOME day.
• Latinoware - where there will be a Fórum do Gnome.
• OSAC - HP's open source advisory council meeting.
• ... and numerous other conferences!

How do you decide if a particular trip is worth it?

The business traveler's secret to traveling with a baby

I am so getting one of these. Before you laugh, imagine me carrying a bookbag, suitcase, carseat and baby. Or how about the time that I put all the suitcases on a cart and let the 8 year old to push the stroller. As I pushed the cart out of the elevator, the strap broke, all the suitcases fell off and the 8 year old jumped out to help me ... leaving the baby in the stroller in the elevator.

Yep, I'm getting one of these.

Another way to find a cheaper ticket

I'm pretty good at finding cheaper or better airfare online but when friends or family ask me to help, I just groan because it takes a LOT of time.

I thought I'd share this tidbit. I was recently looking for airfare for a pretty expensive short notice trip to Europe. Orbitz told me the cheapest fare was $1806. FareCompare told me the cheapest ticket was $1650. When I clicked on the "purchase this airfare" on FareCompare, it opened a window to Orbitz! So I bought a ticket on Orbitz for cheaper than Orbitz had listed. One of two things is at work:

• Either FareCompare has a deal with Orbitz where they get something off the ticket and they pass some of that on to me.
• Or Orbitz's search engine isn't working well enough to find me the cheapest fare.

So knowing where to look can save you money - the cheapest fare one travel site shows isn't always the cheapest fare.

Traveling alone - no big deal

After the question of "who's taking care of the baby?" the most common questions I get about travel are all about traveling alone. I usually just shrug and say it's no big deal - it's not. But last week my grandma (who's 91) was asking me lots of questions about my trip to Istanbul. Are you flying by yourself? How do you get to your hotel? Will you know anybody there? Will you be eating alone all the time? She wasn't worried about me, she was just very curious. Her whole life she's wanted to go see her "cousins in Holland" and she's never gone. (I've always regretted I didn't just book tickets and take her. It would be hard to take her now for health reasons.)

So this trip I paid attention to how I do things and I realized I'm always thinking about logistics and safety. For example, here are some of the things I do:

• Money.
  
  • Before I clear customs I get cash from an ATM machine. This trip was one of those interesting times - the machine only displayed Turkish. The last screen stumped me for a minute. I was pretty sure one option was something like "do another transaction" and the other was "I'm done." But they were both one word, same color, same number of letters, ... I picked the bottom one and my card came back out. (And once again I forgot to check the exchange rate ahead of time so I just guessed at how many Turkish lira I needed. My usual approach is to withdraw the maximum option - only in Norway that turned out to be more than my bank would let me take out in any 24 hour period. Norway turned out to be expensive.)
  • I also always make sure that I have a backup id and a credit card - one in my wallet and another set in my rollaboard. If I lose my briefcase or misplace my wallet I want something to fall back on. I've heard too many horror stories of people far from home that suddenly have nothing. I think it's far more likely I would lose my wallet than I'd get robbed, but either would be a major pain.
• Transportation.
  
  • Leaving customs I looked for a guy with a sign with my name on it. The hotel had included my ride. This always makes me (unjustifiably) nervous. What if they take you somewhere else? What if they knocked out the real guy and this is some bad guy holding the sign. Too many movies! The guy holding the sign turned out to be a very polite young man who was a very cautious driver and he didn't speak any English. So I wasn't able to do my normal cab ride conversation - my Turkish wasn't quite up for it. (Usually I do public transportation or a cab.)
  • When I get to the hotel I ask about public transportation to the conference venue. If it's less than a couple of miles, I usually walk. (Dan Frye from IBM actually gave me that tip - he said he always picks a hotel he can walk from. It's his exercise in days full of meetings.)
• Lodging. I found the hotel on Tripadvisor - I searched for cheap, top ranking hotels and then I used Google maps to see how far they were from the conference venue. (Actually, first I checked the conference hotels and then I started looking for other ones.) The hotel must have internet access and positive reviews. I used to look for a gym too - a hotel with a gym is very hard to find in Europe. I also like hotels with restaurants or room service or near lots of restaurants in case I end up eating alone late at night.
• Eating. The one thing I don't like about traveling alone is eating out alone all the time so I'll try to arrange dinner with different folks if I'm in a city or at a conference where I know a lot of people. Eating out alone bothers me less now than it used to but I always remember the Denny's guy who said "You're eating alone? How sad!" If I'm eating alone, I usually end up eating with a book or my laptop open. Or I find a good people watching place - I love sitting at an outdoor restaurant watching people.

So as you can see, other than eating, traveling alone is a lot like traveling with friends and family. Just a little more quiet time to read or work on the airplane and in the hotel!

Maybe I can cash in on silly travel policies

I figured out how I can get free vacations. If friends buy me a ticket, they can check their bags for free!

Up to eight people traveling on the same reservation as someone with premium status will be exempt from the first and second bag fees.

And hey, I can even get you extra leg room!

There are some parts about having "premium status" with United that I really appreciate, like shorter lines at check-in and security. But this whole baggage thing is a mess. Charge everyone or charge no one. Charge for all baggage, including carry-ons, or don't charge for any.

I'm dreading my next flight ... how much stuff do you think people are going to try to carry on if they have to pay $15 to check it?

Beat jetlag ... by not eating for 12 hours before breakfast

Beat jetlag by not eating for 12-16 hours before breakfast (in the time zone you want to be in). According to ParentingSquad, this works because most mammals need to forage for food during daylight hours. So your body will quickly adjust to sleeping when there's no food so that it can search for food during the day.

I wonder if this is why I never have much trouble with jetlag ... Let me know if you try it and it works for you. (Skipping airplane food doesn't sound like such a bad idea anyway ...)

[UPDATE] Science Friday had a good segment on this, Circadian Clock Sets at Lunchtime. They explain that your body has two clocks, one based on external light and one based on food. While the external light one can only shift about two hours a day, the food one will override it in times of necessity. So starve yourself for 16 hours and then eat breakfast and your food clock will take over to make sure you are awake when there's food.

Why do you travel?

I like Dustin Wax's reason:

I think traveling should be about something more than doing what the locals do.

I mean, don’t even think about doing what the tourists do. I’m not advocating that horror. But traveling is about experiencing things new and fresh — something the locals simply can’t do. After all, you are a local, when you’re at home. How exciting is that?

And really, going well beyond what the locals do is not only valuable for you, the traveler, it’s valuable for the locals themselves. Travelers — real travelers, travelers with a sense of derring-do and adventure, and a bit of the Tao of Travel about them — give people a chance to show off, to experience their everyday surroundings as if they were fresh and new. You can easily take that old ruin on the side of the hill for granted — it is, after all, just a place where teenagers go to drink and make out — until some traveler passing through asks you what it is. Ah, there’s a story to be told…

Traveling is about discovering how delightful something different is. And you can share that. (That said, as a teenager in Barcelona, there is only so many times you can show off the Picasso museum.)

A good travel story

We were flying home from New Orleans to Denver ... via Washington DC. No amount of begging, pleading or whining could get United to put us on the direct New Orleans to Denver flight. At one point they said for $200 they would put us on the waitlist. So we showed up at the airport and asked to fly standby. They said no, because the direct flight to Denver was 30 minutes after the DC flight. Argh.  But then, while we are sitting at the gate waiting for the DC flight, they page us, and give us vouchers for free roundtrip tickets and confirmed seats on the direct Denver flight! Turns out the Washington DC flight was overbooked and up until then nobody had realized that we would have been happy to help them out with that problem. We would have done it for free but we're delighted with the free ticket vouchers.

Home four hours early with free tickets for our next vacation.

Let's just build condos in the airport

Today's USA Today says there are now medical clinics and pharmacies in airports for travelers. Because they spend so much time in the airport and they aren't allowed to carry syringes and the like. While we are at it, why don't we just build some condos, daycares, grocery stores, ... Then we could just go through security once, when we're born - well actually if you're born in the airport hospital, you've already passed security - anyways, we'd live in a security zone. We'd eat with plastic knives and forks, go to the doctor for routine shots because you can't own your own syringes, knit with plastic needles, buy all cosmetics in 2 ounce sizes (no need to store the bigger sizes from Sam's), buy your vegetables precut, no cars because I'm sure you could build a bomb out of one (think of all that money you'd save in gas!), ... but you'd be safe!

Shure headphones

I really liked my Shure headphones that Frank got me for Christmas a few years ago. However, when they broke - or rather just stopped working - I decided to just go back to the default iPod headphones. Not a good decision. The background noise on the BART train and on the airplane yesterday were so loud that I couldn't hear my podcasts at full volume! (I managed to listen to one of my audiobooks on the airplane at full volume - I guess it's no wonder my ears are ringing now.) So I'm buying a new pair of Shure headphones.

These are in your ear, fitted earphones that are noise isolating - meaning they block out external sounds. (Not always safe for running outside but great for noisy gyms, airplanes and airports. At the gym, I can actually listen to my own music and I don't hear the music on the stereo speakers at all.)

They now have earphones that connect to both your audio player and your cell phone. Since I'm in the market for a headphone for my cell phone, I looked into that, but the reviews were terrible.

The earphones come in different levels of quality from 1 to 5. Since I'm not an audiophile and I mostly listen to books and podcasts, I'm getting the 1 version (SE110). (The price difference is substantial.)