I avoid using the term “road warrior”, but now I’m ready to reconsider. As a business traveler, says Bob Greene, who has been one for 28 years, “you have to have the resourcefulness of somebody who crawls through the underbrush with paint on their face.”Airline delays and missed connections are at record levels. Airplanes have never been as crowded. Fares are rising. Business trips are tightly scheduled, with no slack to handle disruption — and disruption keeps coming.Now there’s talk of imminent mergers. Wall Street loves the idea, but business travellers see it as meaning still fewer seats, fewer scheduling choices, and more delays and missed connections.I spoke with business travellers from Vurv Technology, a human resources software company in Jacksonville, Florida, that has clients in the US and abroad. Greene, the vice president for product marketing, is on the road about once a week. He has a battle plan.Vurv travellers often have to make connections through Atlanta, Houston or elsewhere. “I have never once trusted an airline’s view of what an appropriate connecting time is, and I now pay more attention to my connecting time than to anything else” when planning a trip, Greene said. If the airline says he has 40 minutes to make a connection, he books another itinerary to build in more time, knowing he can stand by for the earlier flight if he happens to arrive in time.He plans how to work productively during longer hours in airports. Have you noticed how many travellers are working at the gate, sometimes sitting on the floor?“I drag out the laptop, put in the wireless card and find an electrical outlet. There are now absolute dogfights as business travellers try to get to the outlets,” said Greene.Bradley Burt, a Vurv training consultant in Phoenix, said he usually flies on Southwest Airlines, where most of his flights are nonstop, and sometimes on US Airways, “where I’m constantly late and constantly running through airports” to make a connection.“The real hard-core business travellers, you can see it in their eyes, in what they're carrying,” he said. “I travel at least once a week, 40 weeks out of the year. I have it down. You just have to get yourself prepared.”
