Business Travel

In 2003, I took my organization on the road for 3 months even though traveling by automobile around significantly of North America. In 2007, I took nearly as lengthy for a road trip from Massachusetts to Alaska and back. In those four years, a number of things changed that substantially affected some practicalities of taking care of company when away from the office and one’s property base for that lengthy a time. If you’re planning extensive business travel and haven’t been on the road in a couple of years, some of these changes may come as a surprise to you, too.

1. Web access. In 2003, high-speed World wide web was a specialty item in the hospitality business, restricted to a few name-brand hotel and coffee-shop chains. Prior to I left on my 2007 trip, a number of individuals told me blithely, “Wi-fi is everywhere now.” I’m glad I looked skeptically at that assessment.

Throughout ten weeks of travel in Canada and the U.S., only 1-third of the time did wi-fi work conveniently and appropriate away in the room where we were staying. An additional third of the time we had been able to use wi-fi after really a bit of technical fiddling or by going to the motel office or restaurant. And the other third of the time, we would have been without Net access had wi-fi been our only option. I had three backup options for this contingency: going on the internet on dialup with the modem in my laptop; using my handheld phone/computer (an AT&T 8525) to pick up email; and telephoning my virtual assistant to ask her to check my email for me.

2. Receipts. If you’re planning to deduct enterprise travel expenses on your taxes, then you will need to save receipts and you want a written record of the expenses and their enterprise purpose. What changed since 2003 in this regard is that a lot more and much more businesses supply receipts on thermal paper whose ink fades and smudges with the least exposure to sun or friction. This indicates that if you shoe-box your receipts into a pocket or a compartment in the auto prior to you record your expenses, you could be unable to decipher your evidence. I’m not certain what the IRS’s take on this development will be, but I’m glad I had the discipline to record the expenses in a little notebook at least every single day or two.

three. Plastic. Throughout our 2003 trip, we had to keep hitting up ATMs for cash, due to the fact really a few locations where we had to pay for things did not accept credit cards. In 2007, the only locations where we genuinely had to have money were a couple of tolls and a couple of tourist attractions. We had 1 Canadian ten-dollar bill with us left over from the previous trip, and apart from that we had been able to charge nearly every thing. When a panhandler tried to hit us up for cash, we were able to say truthfully that we had none. We were putting every thing on plastic, sorry!

4. Cell phone coverage. Our surprise here was that there wasn’t as much improvement in cellular service for the a lot more remote sections of the U.S. as we expected. Along interstate highways, you can pretty a lot expect to get a signal. But otherwise, where population density is low or nonexistent, cell phone coverage is usually likewise absent. A huge exception was national parks. I had a lengthy conversation with a friend back residence from Denali National Park in Alaska, where the entire county has only 1800 or so full-time residents.

5. Mail forwarding. This change isn’t the progress toward efficiency that you may expect. It took longer in 2007 than in 2003 to get postal mail forwarding going and longer to stop the forwarding. My postmaster explained that forwarding was now centralized and computerized. Whereas previously, individual post offices had been in charge of forwarding mail addressed to residents in their service region, now this was handled at the regional mail processing facility. My postmaster could put in the request to begin or stop mail forwarding, but he had no direct control over the procedure, and it took 7-10 days for the forwarding and the no-far more-forwarding orders to take effect.

Be prepared for these and other changing conditions, and you’ll have a better, easier and more prosperous time away from house.