A Victorian 747
Saving money has nothing at all to do with travel agents, online or offline, neither has it anything to do with negotiating contracts with airlines or fee levels with TMC’s. It has nothing to do with taking a later plane or going around the houses to get from A to B. It has everything to do with your company culture and how you view the need to travel. I have heard quite a few senior company officers talking about how little they have travelled this year, compared to last; “Do you know, this time last year, I had already made 20 trips, this year I have only made 3!” They say, proudly. To which I reply “Really? And your company has not gone bust, nor has it fallen apart at the seams?”
What this shows, is that we focus too much on the cost of travel and not nearly enough on the reason for travel. I am not, for a moment, suggesting that no-one needs to go anywhere – what I am saying is that it is time to seriously think about why one is travelling in the first place, ever bearing in mind the maxim “The quickest way to save money on travel, is not to travel in the first place”.
Why do we need to travel so much? Let’s face it, the “global economy” is not new. The East India Company, Tea Clippers, the Chinese trips of Zhou Man and Yang Qing – hell!- even the Romans fought a war with the Persians whilst trying to open new trade routes to the Far East. At that time, one could not consider simply popping over from Amsterdam to Peking for a meeting – such would take many months and was fraught with many dangers – and would take many months to get back home again.
Yet today, we have instant global communications, we have video conferencing, we have means of communications that makes one wonder, if such were available to the ancients, what would they have achieved!? The Victorians, who forged the way in many respects to introduce us to mass travel and who laid the groundings of our modern internet, traded throughout the world without the need to “pop over for a meeting” yet today, in many corporations, we do not seem to be able to manage a weeks’ work without having to criss cross the globe.
The ability and feeling of need, to travel became ingrained in our business psyche somewhere along the way. Certainly, in the New World, there is the view that “ability to be there” somehow equates with showing dynamic ability, the “can do” approach – Why? What needs to travel is knowledge, know how, management skills – and that does not always require the human form to travel with it. Perhaps the biggest reason for excessive travel is the failure to delegate; the need to excercise immediate control, in turn, the failure to place the right person in the right place to begin with and then to empower them.
The problem is not technology, the problem is that we have not really learnt how to use it and how to incorporate the use of technology into the way we do business. The need to be there, physically, is not as important as we think it is. It is here, at such a fundamental level where we start to save money on travel – asking ourselves – Why?
