Air Travel - I'd Rather Go By Car

Fwiffo said:
It’s 5g. Isn’t it so quick that in two seconds you can download a 4K movie? Short bursts rather than any sustained crowding of that frequency.
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I dunno' isn't it linked to the vaccine somehow?

CEO of Schipol says full recovery of airline business not until 2024:

nltimes.nl

The aviation industry won't be back to normal before 2024, says Schiphol CEO Dick Benschop

“The vaccines are really on the way, we will notice that in aviation from the second quarter of 2021. But that does not mean that everything is immediately back to the old way. The economy has taken a huge blow. I do not expect that we will be back to the normal level before 2024, 2025.” This...
nltimes.nl nltimes.nl
 
www.bbc.com

A few frequent flyers 'dominate air travel'

Those who fly more should be taxed more, and air miles incentives should be banned, campaigners say.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

With flights being curtailed for the past 12 plus months I wonder who gets taxed first.
  • Canada: 22% of the population takes 73% of flights
  • The Netherlands: 8% of people takes 42% of flights.
  • China: 5% of households takes 40% of flights
  • India: 1% of households takes 45% of flights.
  • Indonesia: 3% of households takes 56% of flights.
 
I fly (or flew) because of work. Same with hotel stays. Some smaller companies might stop flying their employees with the tax, but I feel the majority of companies who have corporate travel would not flinch at paying more. Some of it gets billed to the client anyway.

I would be surprised if leisure travel is a big part of the numbers and therefore I'm not sure how much a tax would really reduce travel.

I wonder if the %s listed in the article are during COVID or before or a combination of both.
 
ballmouse said:
I fly (or flew) because of work. Same with hotel stays. Some smaller companies might stop flying their employees with the tax, but I feel the majority of companies who have corporate travel would not flinch at paying more. Some of it gets billed to the client anyway.

I would be surprised if leisure travel is a big part of the numbers and therefore I'm not sure how much a tax would really reduce travel.

I wonder if the %s listed in the article are during COVID or before or a combination of both.
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my same thoughts, pretty much to the dot. I am a frequent traveller only cause of work. I have miles thanks to work. And my company will not mind paying more for it.
On the other hand, COVID has shown that we can do a lot more over zoom that we thought we could. I'll definitely won't be doing any more 14-hr trips to then attend 1.5 days of meetings, ever again. That's gone for good.
 
belinmad said:
I'll definitely won't be doing any more 14-hr trips to then attend 1.5 days of meetings, ever again. That's gone for good.
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Is that because you don’t want to, though? I know plenty of people of people who can’t wait to get back to constant travel and are already back to fly-in fly-out meetings at least for internal purposes, because otherwise they are bored to death, having an additional 2-3 days per week where they need to pretend to be working or otherwise kill time.
 
I did not enjoy travelling for work. I'll be glad if I never have to do it again.

There's a big difference between business travel and leisure travel. For business, you go to the office and back to the hotel. After a day of work the most amount of recreation you get is a dinner or drink afterwards. Then it's back to a rigid schedule of meetings throughout the day and twiddling thumbs in between in a new city where you get the occasional face to face meeting that would not have happened remotely. Most of the time I'm expensing 1.5-3k a week to go a couple hundred or thousand miles away where no one gives a damn whether I'm there or not.

But try to tell them you want to work remotely and you get facial expressions the equivalent of telling them you want to carry an AK47 to the office.
 
That's the bad kind of business travel. I was referring to the ok business travel, e.g. my current favorite: leave for Paris around 8/9, arrive before noon, have a leisurely stroll or do some shopping, go to lunch, arrive at the meeting around 2, finish at 4, go to the hotel and then some bar, meet for dinner around 8/9, get drunk, meet around 9/10 next morning for an extended breakfast, leave around noon at the latest and go straight home. Two full days with at most 3-5 hours of work including phone calls etc. I don't like to do that once or twice a week anymore, but there are plenty of people who do, because they don't have anything better to do.
 
güero said:
That's the bad kind of business travel. I was referring to the ok business travel, e.g. my current favorite: leave for Paris around 8/9, arrive before noon, have a leisurely stroll or do some shopping, go to lunch, arrive at the meeting around 2, finish at 4, go to the hotel and then some bar, meet for dinner around 8/9, get drunk, meet around 9/10 next morning for an extended breakfast, leave around noon at the latest and go straight home. Two full days with at most 3-5 hours of work including phone calls etc. I don't like to do that once or twice a week anymore, but there are plenty of people who do, because they don't have anything better to do.
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I approach my business trips as I would a weekend or short break. Hence I will take in the museums and galleries, local cuisine and arrive back thoroughly refreshed from my company paid for holiday. Some evenings if alone, I will just stay in and do room service, but I still take time out to explore. Otherwise it just ends up time hanging around airports waiting to get there and back.
 
I don't enjoy travelling for work at all. Tbh one of the main reasons being food generally sucks in every major city. Sure, gastronomic delights can be found for a dinner or so but not for every meal of the day which you will inevitably eat garbage masquerading as food. I find major cities the worst and Hotel food of all stripes is garbage.

Zoom/Teams sucks but as opposed to regular work travel, it is nirvana.
 
QuandoDio said:
I don't enjoy travelling for work at all. Tbh one of the main reasons being food generally sucks in every major city. Sure, gastronomic delights can be found for a dinner or so but not for every meal of the day which you will inevitably eat garbage masquerading as food. I find major cities the worst and Hotel food of all stripes is garbage.

Zoom/Teams sucks but as opposed to regular work travel, it is nirvana.
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That's why you should miss out lunch and all those snacks served with coffee and tea.

If you're doing it intermittently, as I do, it's still enjoyable with the adrenalin rush of travel. But if you're on the red eye a couple of times a week, I get that will become tiring very quickly. Same as being on the road. 1999-2001 I was process auditing during a merger and was driving all over the UK, all of the time, day-in-day-out. By Friday, I use to come home have dinner, have a couple of bottle of beers and sleep solidly for 12 hours.
 
Luckily, it is intermittent these days but even that is a drag. Tail end of last year I was in Munich, Manchester, England and Paris. What they serve in Manchester, England is not food. I was at the Marriot.

Munich was arguably worse. Even with all the hipsters and I am not a fan of the myriad sausages. German food is akin to eating dirt on the road. Paris (lunch/ dinners if you look properly) is excellent. Breakfast is pitiful as expected.

I like travel a lot. I just prefer it to be calmer considered and not for very long.
 
güero said:
Is that because you don’t want to, though? I know plenty of people of people who can’t wait to get back to constant travel and are already back to fly-in fly-out meetings at least for internal purposes, because otherwise they are bored to death, having an additional 2-3 days per week where they need to pretend to be working or otherwise kill time.
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It's not so much that "I don't want to", it's more that the return on investment is not good enough compared to doing the same thing via zoom. I manage 10 countries, and ~75% of our revenue comes from 3 of them. I'd rather spend more time visiting those, and maybe now doing slightly longer trips (2-3 days, maybe include a weekend here and there), and leave the other 7 countries to the regional managers, they can decide when and how long to go for, I'll continue "covering" them via zoom every month or so. I have plenty of stuff to focus on with the time and energy saved. We save on our travel budget, allow countries a little bit more leeway in their decision making and operations, and have additional resources to focus on growth opportunities elsewhere.

güero said:
That's the bad kind of business travel. I was referring to the ok business travel, e.g. my current favorite: leave for Paris around 8/9, arrive before noon, have a leisurely stroll or do some shopping, go to lunch, arrive at the meeting around 2, finish at 4, go to the hotel and then some bar, meet for dinner around 8/9, get drunk, meet around 9/10 next morning for an extended breakfast, leave around noon at the latest and go straight home. Two full days with at most 3-5 hours of work including phone calls etc. I don't like to do that once or twice a week anymore, but there are plenty of people who do, because they don't have anything better to do.
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I want to work where you work. My away-days are usually 7-8 hour long, in between meeting my teams, internal stakeholders and clients. If it's a familiar city, I prefer to skip business dinners and go out with friends locally. That's as much leisure as I get (plus the occasional weekend as I mentioned).

QuandoDio said:
I don't enjoy travelling for work at all. Tbh one of the main reasons being food generally sucks in every major city. Sure, gastronomic delights can be found for a dinner or so but not for every meal of the day which you will inevitably eat garbage masquerading as food. I find major cities the worst and Hotel food of all stripes is garbage.

Zoom/Teams sucks but as opposed to regular work travel, it is nirvana.
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If there's 2 things I try to get right (and not always succeed) when I travel is i)to get a run in the morning before meetings and ii) ensure that as many meals as possible are both interesting as well as good. I ask teams to make reservations close to the office for lunch, whether it's internal or client, and as I mentioned I skip business dinners and do that with local friends instead. The expense account allows for fairly decent grub in most major cities I travel to.
 
belinmad said:
I want to work where you work.
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Maybe you do. We don't care about return on investment at all, I don't think I have ever heard someone use that term (or similar terms). Disadvantage is that we also never get anything done and everything takes forever, that took some adjustment for me. I've only had jobs where I can decide what the "return on investment" is (or whatever cult object the specific organization has) for a while now, so I've been bascially free to travel as much or little as I want. But as I said above, I am one of very few not wanting to travel, most people I know desperately want to go back to spending time at airports and in planes.
 
güero said:
But as I said above, I am one of very few not wanting to travel, most people I know desperately want to go back to spending time at airports and in planes.
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That's because there is a buzz with travel and having a city break on the company's tab.
 
www.nbcnews.com

Air travel sees sharp decline as delta variant continues to derail vacation plans

“The summer travel boom is at risk of stalling out as we move into fall,” said one travel expert.
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com

"Domestic online flight bookings in July fell to $5.26 billion, a 13 percent decline from the previous month and 16 percent below 2019 levels, according to data from Adobe’s Digital Economy Index.

And August numbers are falling even faster: In just the first three weeks of the month, August 1-21, $2.9 billion was spent online for domestic flights. That’s 33 percent below the same period in 2019."
 
Rambo said:

An Entire Generation of Americans Has No Idea How Easy Air Travel Used to Be | naked capitalism

While air passengers today might someday see the eventual end of the COVID-19 public health security measures, they’re far less likely to see a return to pre-9/11 security levels at airports.
www.nakedcapitalism.com www.nakedcapitalism.com
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They can see it on old pre Sept 11th television shows like Friends where people accompanying the passenger say goodbye at the gate.

But they don't always show the glassware or metal cutlery that you can use to stab fellow passengers.
 
Rambo said:
that's based on this real event

nypost.com

Woman caught breastfeeding her hairless cat on a Delta flight

A woman who flew from Syracuse to Atlanta caused a scene on a Delta flight when she was seen breastfeeding her cat.
nypost.com nypost.com
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Madness. I would be surprised but sadly acts of lunacy and depravity are being displayed more and more these days. And the increased incidence of pet ownership and symbiotic relationships between a lot of women and their pets is alarming.
 
www.nbcnews.com

Delta says flight to Shanghai turned back because of new Covid rules

The incident comes as China clamps down on Covid travel restrictions ahead of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com

"The consulate in San Francisco did not name Delta but said in a short statement Sunday that many flights from the U.S. to China had been delayed or canceled in recent days including a flight that turned back more than halfway to its destination."

Thank you for flying with Delta and welcome back to the US.
 
Fwiffo said:
www.nbcnews.com

United Airlines offers triple pay to pilots amid travel chaos

The pay bump will extend from Dec. 30 to Jan. 29, an airline executive said.
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com

3x the pay to fly the infected through the unfriendly skies. Win for United. Win for pilots. Win for passengers.
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Plus All American Airlines are pretty much a disaster. You might as well be travelling with Air Botswana with the harrowing travel experience you experience from them.

The Pilots are clearly not paid enough.
 
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