Executive Travel : How to Make a Half-Empty Trip Half Full

Staying over a Saturday night while on a business trip can be a nightmare or a dream come true for business travelers, depending on where you are and what you find to do while you’re there.

Many companies now encourage their traveling employees to extend their business travel to take advantage of discount fares. According to a survey done by Hampton Inns Inc., about 28% of business trips last year included a weekend stay.

“Weekend stays can be a mixed blessing,” said Ross Goldstein, a San Francisco-based psychologist and founder of Generation Insights, a marketing firm. “It is an opportunity to have a mini vacation, but there is a downside. Weekends are the only time most parents get to see their children.”

The problem isn’t just the time away, it’s the significance of the time away that matters, he said. Weekends are when important events as well as unstructured family time occur.

“Also, a lot of important family decisions get made on the weekends,” Goldstein said.

This loss of participation in family decision making can be especially hard, he said, citing as examples professional athletes that he counsels. “These are baseball and football stars who command a tremendous amount of power in the rest of their lives, but at home, they have none.”

Weekend travel for business is also hard if you don’t have a family, Goldstein said. “I see it a lot with traveling salesmen. They fall out of sync with the regular social patterns of their friends. They feel detached and distanced.”

The antidote to isolation is to use the phone a lot and to schedule extra time with friends and family.

If you have to be away on the weekend, however, you might as well try to make it enjoyable.

A recent survey by Air Travel Card asked 200 business travelers what they liked to do during their free time on the road. About half said they liked to tour an attraction or a historic landmark in the city, and the other half said they liked to walk or go jogging.

Getting to know a new area was cited as one of the perks of business travel. When asked which statement best characterized their feelings about business travel, 70% of respondents in the survey said, “It’s part of the job,” but 22% said, “It gives me something to do and allows me to see other parts of the country.”

“The first thing I do when I go to a new area is get the Sunday paper to see what’s going on,” said Amy Clark, who travels for months at a time as a sales rep for GTE Yellow Pages Advertising.

She also polls hotel employees and stops at airport information booths to get ideas on places to go.

“Traveling gets old when you do it straight,” Clark said. She breaks up the monotony by trying to find music at a local club or an area of the city to combine shopping with some sightseeing.

Some people plan their business trips with their leisure pursuits in mind. One business consultant who travels a lot, for example, gets “stranded” on the weekends so he can go sailing off the Gulf Coast in Texas.

For Karen McAlister, a meeting planner based in Farmington, Mich., seeing the sights makes her better at her job.

“I like to see as much of the city as I possibly can,” McAlister said. That way when clients ask her what they can do there, she has some ideas.

If it’s a city she’s completely unfamiliar with, she’ll check out a travel video from her video store or library before she But the best ideas usually come from locals, such as cabdrivers, or the concierge at the hotel, she said. It was a cabdriver on a recent trip to New Orleans, for example, who told her about Mother’s, a local hangout with great food at reasonable prices.

Horse-and-buggy tours offered in many downtowns are another way to get a feel for a new city, McAlister said. And if the city is on the water, you can look into a boat tour of the bay or harbor. On a recent trip to Los Angeles, for example, McAlister chartered a sailboat with a skipper in Marina del Rey and went sailing for four hours.

For low-cost entertainment, she said, nothing beats asking for the best place to view the skyline at sunset.

In his book “Hit the Ground Running, the Insider’s Guide to Executive Travel,” (Chapmans, 1993) world-class business traveler Mark McCormack advises people to jot down the names of restaurants, sights, activities or out-of-the-way hotels whenever someone mentions them and then drop them in a file for reference when you might have to go to that city on business.

“Even when you don’t have much time, trying to run out and see something can give you more energy,” McAlister said. “I find when I travel, my energy level goes up. Sometimes you can jam more into an hour on the road than you could ever get accomplished if you were at home.”

Even with the best intentions, however, there are some times, and some locations, when a Saturday night on a business trip just doesn’t seem like a vacation.

“Sometimes I just hole up in the hotel and work my way through it,’ said Todd Burger, management consultant for Arthur D. Little Inc. “That way, I can take Monday and Tuesday off.”