Post Tagged with: "Business Travelers"

Cities Scramble as Business Travel Declines

February 27, 2009 at 12:17 am

(Source: CNN)

Gone are the days, it seems, when executives can comfortably lounge poolside, expensing meetings and meals along with margaritas and massages.

Especially for those employed by companies that benefited from the billions of federal bailout dollars, those kinds of luxuries are going downhill faster than a CEO on a triple black diamond ski slope.

As President Barack Obama, Congress and the financially anxious public continue to cry out for corporate responsibility, what does this crackdown mean to American cities and to industries that are fueled by business travelers, conventions and meetings?

“January was a disaster,” said Don Singh, a Las Vegas, Nevada, taxi driver, who added that he brought home about half of what he did the previous year.

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Commuter Hell: Business travelers hate small commuter planes

February 25, 2009 at 12:42 pm

(Source:  CondeNast Portfolio.com)

Turbo-prop planes and regional jets are a crucial part of the airlines’ route strategies and are often the only way a business traveler can easily get to a destination, but road warriors hate flying them.

Within minutes of Continental Connection Flight 3407’s fatal crash on the night of February 12, frequent fliers were emailing each other, cursing commuter airlines, and vowing never to board smaller commercial aircraft again.

“I HATE THOSE TINY OLD RJS,” one otherwise rational business traveler I know shouted in his email. “NOBODY SHOULD FLY THEM. THEY’RE NOT SAFE.”

No matter that the aircraft involved in Flight 3407’s fiery end six miles from Buffalo Niagara International Airport was not an “RJ,” industry shorthand for regional jet. (It was a Q400, a twin-engine turboprop plane manufactured by Bombardier of Canada.) No matter that the 74-seat Q400 isn’t particularly tiny. (At 107 feet long with a 93-foot wingspan, it is about the size of several early versions of Boeing’s workhorse B737 jet and 20 feet longer than Bombardier’s 50-seat regional jet.) And no matter that the Q400 isn’t old. (The Q400 series didn’t enter service until 2000 and the plane that crashed in Buffalo was less than a year old.)

Safe? That is most definitely in the eye of the beholder—and most business travelers eye commuter airlines with extreme trepidation. They don’t like flying them. They don’t like that the commuter lines wrap themselves in the colors and livery of the major airlines. And they are convinced, rightly or wrongly, that commuter carriers simply aren’t as safe as the major airlines they mimic.

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