EricAY05 wrote:

All those people complaining about how tough it is to travel so much in J, F and stay in top-notch hotels, could just change careers and settle for something more convenient. But they won't, and if there is a situation where someone else could take their job, they will fight to keep it.

That's true, however for every business traveler you mentioned there are 10 travelers like me - lowest logical fare + Holiday Inn. Believe me, becoming Star Gold on Dash 8 flights is literally painful.

WildcatYXU wrote:

EricAY05 wrote:

All those people complaining about how tough it is to travel so much in J, F and stay in top-notch hotels, could just change careers and settle for something more convenient. But they won't, and if there is a situation where someone else could take their job, they will fight to keep it.

That's true, however for every business traveler you mentioned there are 10 travelers like me - lowest logical fare + Holiday Inn. Believe me, becoming Star Gold on Dash 8 flights is literally painful.

I have to agree. I am an engineer in IT and telecommunication and in my last job I was working in customer service for a smaller company somewhere in Germany. We had customers around the world for our products. Local sales and service partners took care of the daily business, but there was only so much they could do. So sometimes the "specialist" had to be flown in for some technical sales or service activities or a training, and yep, that was me.
I usually had two or three trips each month, and at least one of it was outside of Europe, e.g. North America, Asia, Africa or so. Usually I stayed with the customer between 3 and 5 days, just enough to mess up my biological clock to make me suffer from jetlag, and to short to adapt to local time.

And as much a I enjoy flying, going to Australia from Europe in Economy is tough. The company tried to save on expenses and many times I had to fight with our in-house travel office:

Me: I will be in Melbourne, Australia next Monday to Thursday. Could you please check the flights for me? Thanks!
Office girl: There is this nice cheap flight leaving on Saturday arriving early Monday morning. So you will be on time with the customer.
Me: No, I'd like to arrive the night before and have a good night's sleep before working with the customer.
Girl: But this flight is 400€ more expensive then the other! And we need to pay another hotel night!
Me: Maybe, but Id' like to be rested before I do some demanding work.
Girl: But the CSO did the same trip two weeks ago and had no problem with the morning arrival.
Me: There is a difference.
He flew Business. He had space to do real work on the plane, got some decent food and slept in a real bed. On arrival he went to the arrival lounge, had breakfast, took a shower, changed and went fresh, relaxed and smart looking to a nice smooth 2 hour meeting with the customer, promissing our product will solve all their problems. This was followed by a business lunch in a fancy location and an interview with a local journalist. Later that day he played golf with some friends to take care of his network (in the interest of the company of course), had dinner in the clubhouse, some drinks in a nice bar, went to his hotel suite and flew to Sydney the next day to do more or less the same there.
I will fly Economy, cramped in a tiny seat for 23hours between two overweight smelly guys, have no space to even open my laptop, get junk food and no chance to catch some sleep. Then I will work 4 days with the customer for 12hours+ each day, trying to make our crappy product work, taking all the heat from the customer and trying to explain why it does not work as promissed. At night I will crash in the cheapest hotel you could find. Still by Thursday evening I will manage to make everything work well enough to be accepted by the customer, rush to the airport to get my flight home arriving Friday night. I will see nothing but the interior of the planes, airports, offices, server rooms and cheap hotels. I will need the whole weekend to recover.

Yes, I changed jobs now. Getting older I really felt this life was more and more demanding on me and my body. I needed ever longer to recover from such a trip. And of course it was hell for my family.

We provide services to companies that build aeroplanes, usually when they are building something new.

I travel internationally in economy and typically to the same sites many times a yea. Sometimes i get upgraded but that doesn't happen too often anymore.

As most people will tell you, it aint glamorous and it does take its toll. The only plus is every 2 years i exchange 500/600k miles for 4 international tickets worth 6-8k euro and free stays at hotels. .

ei146 wrote:

Yes, I changed jobs now. Getting older I really felt this life was more and more demanding on me and my body. I needed ever longer to recover from such a trip. And of course it was hell for my family.

In the case you're describing I'd simply refuse to go. Some people simply can't understand that business travel is completely different compared to leisure and there is no beach lounger waiting for us on the other end. The fact that they would book a J product for an executive and Y only for a technical specialist is outrageous.

That said, I've done several YYZ - NRT's in Y on my old job, but always had time to recover. And it was in the pre-Rovinescu Air Canada era, so the Y seats were acceptable. Now I fly on business only in Canada and the number of trips per year is limited.

My former teacher in the RDAF now works as an instructor for a major software supplier. There is not a week that goes by, without his usual Facebook updates that shows pictures of aircraft cabins and updates from various hotels, restaurants etc. across the globe.

EricAY05 wrote:

theobcman wrote:

Something that I am involved with is working as an 'On Board Courier' hence my user name. The work is unpredictable/infrequent and random but we do get to fly a lot ! Based at LHR anything from Paris to Sydney could come up at any time. Flights are normally in Y but the points I build up allow for some nice journeys later on !

What type of education does this require, if any? Are you allowed to not take the next flight and enjoy the city or lounge for short while (couple of hours)?

No specific education required at all for that. It's just part of the job I'm in. Yes you can absolutely stay as long as you want. Its normally paid hotel for one night (Depending on the job) and there after its up to you. Couple of examples :

Arrive MAD late morning, into town for lunch, look around & back to airport for return.

Arrive SYD early Sunday morning. Have the whole day to yourself. I took the ferry to Manley and the zoo. Hotel Sunday night paid. Monday morning delivery and back to airport late afternoon for the return.

Sometimes on short European jobs I don't leave the airport, just turn around and go back again to be home in the evening.

theobcman wrote:

EricAY05 wrote:

theobcman wrote:

Something that I am involved with is working as an 'On Board Courier' hence my user name. The work is unpredictable/infrequent and random but we do get to fly a lot ! Based at LHR anything from Paris to Sydney could come up at any time. Flights are normally in Y but the points I build up allow for some nice journeys later on !

What type of education does this require, if any? Are you allowed to not take the next flight and enjoy the city or lounge for short while (couple of hours)?

No specific education required at all for that. It's just part of the job I'm in. Yes you can absolutely stay as long as you want. Its normally paid hotel for one night (Depending on the job) and there after its up to you. Couple of examples :

Arrive MAD late morning, into town for lunch, look around & back to airport for return.

Arrive SYD early Sunday morning. Have the whole day to yourself. I took the ferry to Manley and the zoo. Hotel Sunday night paid. Monday morning delivery and back to airport late afternoon for the return.

Sometimes on short European jobs I don't leave the airport, just turn around and go back again to be home in the evening.

If something seems to good to be true, it usually is What's the catch?

Do you work for a company or are you self-employed through some of those online sites that offer jobs for such couriers? I would imagine that for someone who lives in Finland, even though I live in Helsinki, there are much less job opportunities than for someone living in Central Europe or the UK, right? If you don't mind, could you give a few examples what the pay is like, a private message is fine. In the Sydney example, did you just leave your package in the hotel room?

A friend of mine is an AKC agility judge - except for weekends she decides to take a break, she's on a plane pretty much every Thurs night and Sunday night.

26point2 wrote:

I often wonder if the rewards of the road warrior: frequent flier miles, go unused. It seems like a lot of effort to do what...get back onto another plane? I am a corporate pilot and spend vast amounts of time either flying, at an airport or at hotels. The last thing I want to do during my vacation is go to another airport. Trains are much more fun for me.

That's what the situation became like for me. For the first 6 months to a year, travelling twice a month for a week at a time was new, exiting and fun. Then reality kicks in, and you find it's just another airport/hotel/office combination, leaving little time to do sight seeing. And even when there was time for sight seeing, it quickly grew boring doing it alone without anyone to share it with.

A spent a lot of miles flying back home to see friends and family, but as the prices dropped and the points got harder to earn, found it was exceedingly poor value; I had to travel 20 times back and forth on a paid ticket, to earn just one 'free' return on miles. Then I started giving my points away to friends and family, allowing them to come and see me. I travelled to the ME and Asia a lot, always using Emirates when possible. It seems outrageous, but I grew tired of C and started using all my points on upgrade to F. The logic being, I was never going to use those miles for an award ticket, so why not blow them on upgrades? The reason I didn't book award tickets with Emirates was simple: They didn't fly between my place of residence and my home town. Well, they did, but it would entail a 6 hour detour in each direction, and that's just silly.

During 8 years I didn't take a single vacation that required a flight. Most of the vacation time I'd just drive home, drop the anchor at my parents place and do my outmost not to move a single inch. The exception was for winter, when I'd drive down the the Alps for a spot of skiing.

Now that I've changed jobs and don't fly at all on business (YESSS!!!!!!), I've found the old love of travelling by air again. But only for pleasure, only to destinations within 3-4 hours and of my choosing, and only when I and the family feels like it.

If I never see the inside of a long-range wide-body again, I'd consider that mission accomplished with honours, swords, gold leaves and what have you.

Once upon a time, I was a corporate human resources executive based in London. I had to fly to the U.S. monthly (two sites) as well as offices in China, South Africa, Switzerland, France, and Canada. Oh my, did I rack up the miles!

Work for an NGO. Luckily do a fair bit of flying although this year it is diminished as a lot of grants are ending. But where we have to go is not usually where the tourists want to go Last work trip was Haiti for two weeks. Actually *very* interesting and Haiti is an amazing country, although poor. And you don't have to be an NGO aid worker "type" My role is IT but working to help build IT infrastructure in developing world. I guess a measure of how successful I am is the fact that I travel less and less. Mixed blessing!

I'm in commercial property management as a Property Manager for strip shopping centers. I have centers spread throughout Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Texas and we are required to hit our properties at least 1x quarterly, some companies require you see the sites monthly. In property management you might luck out and require a majority of your sites be a fly in/fly out type deal, my last company which was the 1x/month visit requirement it was all driving.

While I am not quite as intense of a road warrior as some I am doing ~40-45 segments per year in my current position. As much as I love flying and traveling I will say it does get tiring. TSA, crapshoot on what rental car you will get, sleeping in an unfamiliar bed, being in unfamiliar places, eating alone, etc. does get old. Yeah you rack of the points for hotels, cars and air but like someone above said.....is it worth it?

My company we are required to book lowest cost, if a connection is cheaper but 8 hours travel time versus 2 they will flex and let you book the non-stop at higher cost so fortunately I am able to book DL most of the time being an ATL hub captive. Due to $ constraints I am typically on a basic economy fare.

Long story short, find a job in a hub or major airport. Companies that require travel typically HQ or have regional offices in cities that have good non-stop service from the home airport.

ei146 wrote:

WildcatYXU wrote:

EricAY05 wrote:

All those people complaining about how tough it is to travel so much in J, F and stay in top-notch hotels, could just change careers and settle for something more convenient. But they won't, and if there is a situation where someone else could take their job, they will fight to keep it.

That's true, however for every business traveler you mentioned there are 10 travelers like me - lowest logical fare + Holiday Inn. Believe me, becoming Star Gold on Dash 8 flights is literally painful.

I have to agree. I am an engineer in IT and telecommunication and in my last job I was working in customer service for a smaller company somewhere in Germany. We had customers around the world for our products. Local sales and service partners took care of the daily business, but there was only so much they could do. So sometimes the "specialist" had to be flown in for some technical sales or service activities or a training, and yep, that was me.
I usually had two or three trips each month, and at least one of it was outside of Europe, e.g. North America, Asia, Africa or so. Usually I stayed with the customer between 3 and 5 days, just enough to mess up my biological clock to make me suffer from jetlag, and to short to adapt to local time.

And as much a I enjoy flying, going to Australia from Europe in Economy is tough. The company tried to save on expenses and many times I had to fight with our in-house travel office:

Me: I will be in Melbourne, Australia next Monday to Thursday. Could you please check the flights for me? Thanks!
Office girl: There is this nice cheap flight leaving on Saturday arriving early Monday morning. So you will be on time with the customer.
Me: No, I'd like to arrive the night before and have a good night's sleep before working with the customer.
Girl: But this flight is 400€ more expensive then the other! And we need to pay another hotel night!
Me: Maybe, but Id' like to be rested before I do some demanding work.
Girl: But the CSO did the same trip two weeks ago and had no problem with the morning arrival.
Me: There is a difference.
He flew Business. He had space to do real work on the plane, got some decent food and slept in a real bed. On arrival he went to the arrival lounge, had breakfast, took a shower, changed and went fresh, relaxed and smart looking to a nice smooth 2 hour meeting with the customer, promissing our product will solve all their problems. This was followed by a business lunch in a fancy location and an interview with a local journalist. Later that day he played golf with some friends to take care of his network (in the interest of the company of course), had dinner in the clubhouse, some drinks in a nice bar, went to his hotel suite and flew to Sydney the next day to do more or less the same there.
I will fly Economy, cramped in a tiny seat for 23hours between two overweight smelly guys, have no space to even open my laptop, get junk food and no chance to catch some sleep. Then I will work 4 days with the customer for 12hours+ each day, trying to make our crappy product work, taking all the heat from the customer and trying to explain why it does not work as promissed. At night I will crash in the cheapest hotel you could find. Still by Thursday evening I will manage to make everything work well enough to be accepted by the customer, rush to the airport to get my flight home arriving Friday night. I will see nothing but the interior of the planes, airports, offices, server rooms and cheap hotels. I will need the whole weekend to recover.

Yes, I changed jobs now. Getting older I really felt this life was more and more demanding on me and my body. I needed ever longer to recover from such a trip. And of course it was hell for my family.

OH.MY.GOD. where's the upvote button?

you hit it right on the head - for every one of these Exec/Sales types who clock constant miles in J/F, there are 10 other schlubs (ie, us) following behind to do the revenue work in Y. You'll find us on oil rigs, factory floors, datacenters; sleep deprived, jet lagged and hungry.

That (beautifully stated) exchange with "office girl" - I refuse to even have it any more. I openly defy standard operating procedure and usually book my own travels, and expense it later. Someday I may get fired for it, but frankly I don't care. "Office girl" does not understand (but she is forgiven) - the Exec who set those travel policies (no Y for them) are the real bastards.

I can deal with the corporate no J/F rule, but the way I do it is to schedule at least one or two extra days on each end of a long-distance trip. There have been a couple times when the company wanted me to fly e.g. London-San Francisco with no notice, and I refused to do it without flying J (we agreed that my presence wasn't actually needed that badly, that week). (It helps that the execs really do toe the line and fly Y or Y+ just like the rest of us.)

Having said that, one does have to recognize that circumstances are not always the same for everyone. If I were to rewind the clock to when I was in my early 30's, say, with a young family and one income, I might not be in such a rush to defy the Powers That Be. I can contemplate not eating for myself, but it's hard to put little kids on the firing line as well, especially if there is no obvious replacement job. In that situation, one mostly has to hope that one's employer is not a sack of sh*t and is not mesmerized by the expense numbers or the near term bottom line.

AngMoh wrote:

Arrive 7 AM Thursday in FRA after 13 hour flight in Y, pick up rental car. Drive to office (which is outside Frankfurt)
[...]

Wow, that's really hard. Since you cannot really sleep in Y I think it's even dangerous.

dc9northwest wrote:

My hint: avoid taxis. Saves a ton of money... a taxi often can be more expensive than a flight segment....

Some taxi drivers at airports are modern pirates. I hate it, on each and every airport there will be taxi drivers to cheat you. If you are not familiar with the city, let's say because it's your first time you have flown to that city, it can be get very expensive. It happened to me twice (once in Bucharest where I didn't know which taxi company and in Hanoi, same story).

This is a great thread, thanks to the OP for asking about this and wording the questions much better than I could have. It's been a subject I've long since meant to bring up on here so it's interesting to finally read about everyone's situation.

I always feel jealous towards the few friends of mine that travel for work despite being fully aware of the many drawbacks, especially as most of them aren't very high-rankers in their companies and probably never get anywhere near a J or F cabin. Here in Europe, the huge presence of LCCs and short overland distances seems to make it even harder to land an 'exotic' travelling job. If anything, reading this thread has made me appreciate travelling where and when I can, even if it's on my own buck.

Good luck.
Used to fly very extensively for pleasure, then moved to a job with very heavy overseas travel, both predictable and one off. Not all bad. Good advice was given earlier about the downsides but here are three other suggestions.

Buy a house on the airport side of the city - too many trips at 05.30 across town going out and 23.30 coming back. Your employer will cope pretty well if you kill yourself due to tiredness, but it may be inconvenient to you and your family.

Stay fit enough to run from Gate A1 to Gate Z99 when the only possible connection starts to fall apart due to late arrival, weather, traffic delays etc. Do not engage in a profession where you need to carry anything heavy in hand luggage, such as legal papers, samples etc.

Check if your employer will let you book your own flights.
There are many people in organisations who by accident, or sometimes design, will inflict impossible routings on you or chose carriers or hotels with reference only to cost.