The flight into Chicago from San Diego was pretty uneventful. You know that for me uneventful is just the most perfect way to travel. Business travelers like myself do so much moving around that everything which happens tends to get magnified and multiplied. Late departures usually put everything else out of sync. Baggage claim delays add precious time in getting to the hotel; which usually means less sleep or having to call the client and reschedule a business meeting.

Just because I’m willing to settle for a cheap hotel in downtown Chicago doesn’t mean that I want shortcuts taken in other aspects of travel. I sacrifice on the higher priced accommodations so I’m able to take in more Major League Baseball. I take clients to games, and simply use the sport as a lovely mental, physical and emotional distraction from the weightiness of every day working life.

This week is sort of a bonanza for me with respect to heading out to the ballpark. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the major metropolitan areas that have 2 baseball teams are always a treat to visit. Why? Because you are almost guaranteed there will be a home game played while you’re in town.

Chicago is no exception to this. I’ve landed smack in the middle of a 10 game home stretch for the Cubs. While my sales schedule didn’t allow for me to do much with the games from Sunday through Tuesday, I was able to not only get out to that elusive day game, but I was able to take my very best Chicago client and his 2 young sons to today’s game.

If you think the act of taking your customers to a sporting event is over rated, and simply something that is done for the benefit of the sales person, you should have seen the look on those youngsters faces. More to the point, you should have seen how happy and satisfied my client was to be able to get away from the daily grind of his office responsibilities.

It was almost devilish the way he snatched up his sons from their school with the serious intent on playing hooky the rest of the afternoon. This caused me to remember those precious few moments from my very own childhood when I was able to attend a day game with my father and grandfather. Perhaps this is the real reason why I love the game so much. Perhaps it’s why I work so hard to incorporate visiting games with customers into my professional life as well.

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If you are planning on heading over to Texas this summer or early fall, be sure to do your travel planning early enough. There are a slew of discount hotels in Houston that will save you money without costing you comfort. Being able to get the most for your travel budget is one of the core concepts of my professional life.

Every month I’m traveling around this country meeting with clients. While our company does pretty well, and is relatively recession proof, it doesn’t mean we aren’t constantly chided to be stingy with the money we require to do our travels. Having been in the traveling sales business for just over 15 years, I am constantly in the mode of refining my needs and tastes as well as learning tips, tricks and techniques for getting the absolute best value for my business travel dollar.

One of the things I learned about 5 years ago was the concept of becoming a travel agent. As with most industries, the Internet has completely transformed how travel agents operate their businesses. In fact, if you compared the number of proper agencies today with just a decade ago, I’m betting there is probably a decrease in the range of 75 or 80%.

The reason has to do with the access the Internet gives to just about anyone with a connection. Over the past few years several organizations have sprung up that allow you to sign up and become a fully credentialed travel agent. Sure it costs you a few bucks up front, however if you travel enough, you’re first year savings easily covers those start up costs.

Most of these online travel groups are set up as multi-level marketing operations. If you’re a bit squeamish about the concept of multi-level, don’t worry. With near instant communications being what they are today, it is near impossible to create the pyramid schemes of the 70’s and 80’s.

I don’t personally use my affiliation to recruit others and develop downline and all that sort of thing. Not that there’s anything wrong with getting involved with these companies in order to generate residual income, etc. I just prefer to use my agent’s discounts to get the very best rates for hotels, rental cars, and airline flights.

The more I get to save on travel expenses, the more I’m able to justify heading off to a ball game whenever possible. You know how much I enjoy that. Right?

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Okay, so I pretty much slacked off on finishing up my travel scheduling this weekend. But to my defense, it was a holiday weekend, and there were home baseball games to be seen!

I was able to catch the Diamondbacks on Friday and Sunday, a home stand against those pesky in-division Los Angeles Dodgers. It was a lot of fun, and on Sunday, two of my good friends brought their wives and children.

This is when I get the best of both worlds. I spend every now and then with my best friends and their families, and I get my fill of what it’s like to have some of my own. The great thing (for me, anyway) is that when the event is over or the holiday has passed, I get to go on with my own life and not have to continue on the responsibilities of have a family of my own.

Some of my buddies (there wives to be exact) tell me that I’m going to regret not having a family of my own some day. Still not sure how that’s going to play out. Having seen both scenarios with my own relatives, I’m not sure that I have much to be worried about.

I’ve one aunt who never married, never had children, and while she’s now in her late 80’s (and spry as ever) she seems happy as a clam with her life, past, present, and not surprisingly her future.

Then there is a great uncle that I know who worked very hard in his life, made a lot of money and built quite the car wash empire. I watched (from afar) how his kids and grandkids fought for what they felt they deserved even before my uncle passed away.

His life, towards the end, just didn’t strike me as one that was all that happy go lucky. He even confided in me a number of times that he’d wished he had remained single and childless like I had. In my heart he was always a decent, hard working fellow that just got caught up with a family whose soul seemed to be more about the wealth and less about the man who’d worked so hard to earn it.

So as I sit here this morning working out all sorts of great deals on hotels (there’s tons more baseball this summer, you know!) I sometimes drift off to thoughts about family (and lack there of.) Fortunately I have a brother who had 2 kids with his first wife and a little sister with one child of her own. And that little girl is all grown up now, and we just found out she’ll be giving birth sometime toward the end of this year.

As the afterglow of America’s birthday passes I know that there will be enough extended family around me so I’ll not have to worry about either the pluses or the minuses of having had my own offspring. And I’m pretty okay with that!

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I overheard some guys at Friday night’s game talking about the demolition of the old Yankee stadium. It seems the Yankee organization has promised to build a three baseball field park in the space where the old stadium now resides. Local residents are all for this option, but architects and city historians are concerned about losing completely the old ballpark completely.

Seems to me that if you decided to go the route of building something new, you really no longer cared much about the old thing. Granted I don’t live in the area, and didn’t grow up in the shadow of the stadium. If I had, perhaps I’d have a different feeling about the whole thing.

What I do know is that whenever the decide to bring the old park down, I really want to be in New York City to witness the event. I’ve already bookmarked a number of websites where I am constantly checking the latest hotel specials. If I’m able to get a great deal on lodging and can budget for the travel, I’m going to be there to witness the hysteria!

Until then of course, I need to continue working my day job. In fact, I’m at JFK Airport right now waiting for my flight down to Charlotte, NC. Not sure if I ever mentioned it on this site before but I actually lived in Charlotte as a kid. I know that I went to school through the second grade and lived right here. I don’t remember the exact address, but who can remember exactly where they lived when they were in the second grade!

Hopefully, I’ll get some time to take the rental car and drive around the old neighborhood while I’m down that way. This is the first time I’ve been back to North Carolina since we moved from there to Sebring, Florida. I’m already beginning to remember some of the times I had growing up in the Charlotte area. Some of them did include the police, but I was rehabilitated so not to worry!

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It’s not uncommon for a business hotel that I stay at to have some sort of bedside clock radio that tells me the time in the middle of the night as well as waking me up to smooth jazz first thing in the morning. Yeah, I like the easy listening stuff. But not that elevator stuff. What’s it called? Oh, I think Musak. Or is it Muzak? Ugh on that.

Well, something I really wish was sort of standard fare in hotel rooms would be a weather information device. Even if they were just the type that hangs on the wall and lets you know barometric pressures, temperature, and such. Of course, my guess is most people have very little knowledge as to how to read those types of gauges. Oh, well.

But the next best thing is free WiFi. How’s that you ask? Well, I just went online and pulled up Google in my browser. For the fun of it, I decided to just enter “Albuquerque weather” to see if the pages that showed up would link me straight to whatever that website’s New Mexico section might have for me.

Not that I’m lazy or anything, but some of these weather sites can get somewhat confusing. You have to either type in a zip code or know how to correctly spell an awkward city (hmm, I wonder if Albuquerque fits into that category? )

So, I type in “Albuquerque weather” and hit enter (because I have learned after years of clicking on the submit button that I only have to hit enter on my keypad!)

BOOM!

Right there at the top of the page of results is the current “Weather for Albuquerque, NM” (I’m guessing they think that is the Albuquerque I wanted. It was!)

Sunny and 86 degrees. Nice. And with a single click I’m taken right to the proper page at my choice of the 3 leading weather websites. Now I know that tomorrow and Thursday are going to be just about the same, with a few more clouds in the sky. No rain for days (not since last weekend, apparently.)

You just have to love technology. When it works, that is!

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At the airport early for my trip up to Seattle. Just a little time so I thought I’d drop a quick post. Sort of getting the hang of this blog stuff, though I’m pretty sure that at the end of the day, it benefits me in a journal keeping sort of way more than anything else. And that’s actually a cool thing.

I regularly read blogs that are written by folks with something to sell. Constantly trying to market something to someone somewhere. I suppose it comes down to one’s temperament and the goals they have. I don’t know. I just know that the more I learn about the various technologies available the more interested I become in this whole process.

To me, it seems okay to tell “the world” about my business travels. For instance, I’ll be staying at several business travel hotels during this month’s journeys. If your work requires you to move about the country like mine does, I’d hope some of my thoughts and observations might provide you with benefit.

The occasional comments and direct emails I get from folks that have happened upon this site tend to be encouraging. It’s always groovy to have a conversation with a like mind. The world’s a big place and communities that are developed online provide news, knowledge and a variety of other benefits that might otherwise be unavailable to a locally based worker.

It’s the appeal traveling and being able to publish those thoughts and observations here that have me motivated to carry on the activities here. Hopefully, the process is appreciated and might even inspire you to do something similar. Sharing a bit about your life with your neighbor or a reader on the other side of the country is motivation enough for me to continue doing what I’m doing. Hope to hear from you soon!

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So the flight into Los Angeles (LAX) was pretty typical. Nothing of outstanding misfortune occurred that would make me want to write about it. There was a lovely woman I sat next to that engaged me in conversation for the last bit of the flight.

Normally I won’t go out of my way to get involved with fellow travelers during a flight. Why, you might ask? Mostly because I figure if they want to be chatty the will be. Please don’t misunderstand my intentions. I’m no scrooge when it comes to meeting new people. I’m as friendly as the next fellow.

Unfortunately, after all of my years of traveling this country, one truth I’ve found self evident is that people like to be in charge of their space, time, and tend to interact accordingly. I’m very much the same way. There have been plenty of times when I don’t care much to interact with those sitting near me on a flight.

Long or short flying times, if someone’s not interested in communicating you just cannot take it personally. And early on in my business travel career I think I did just that. When I wasn’t able to engage my fellow seat mates, I thought there must be something wrong with me.

Did I smell funny? I know it wasn’t because of my cologne, so maybe it was my bathing habits? Or perhaps my diet that leaked odors out through my sweat pores? I just didn’t know.

As I was taking the shuttle to my room at the LA Convention Center Hotel I remembered back to one conversation I had with an older gentleman on a cross country flight. The essence of our talk was him sharing lessons from his quarter century of traveling for a living.

Only rarely have I had the opportunity to be in the company of individuals I’d consider professional mentors so I basically asked questions and listened with my mouth shut and my ears wide open!

The biggest take away from that time dealt with simply focusing on other peoples needs. This man shared with me that by giving to others what they needed in the moment of my interactions with them, I was doing everything possible to be a great sales person. I was learning about the other party while not worrying about getting something in return.

Amazing advice. I’ve followed it ever since both in my sales career as well as learning more about the person sitting next to me on a plane. Or not as the case may be with that particular individual.

But back to this lovely woman. For some reason she was stuck on visiting Pinks Hot Dogs in Hollywood. I’d heard of them of course, but to hear her go on about the made me want to figure out how to make a visit happen. And while I’m not sure I can make it this trip to L.A. I am going to be back here in less than 2 weeks, so perhaps I’ll be able to have a bite then. We shall see!

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After having traveled as much as I’ve done the past many years, things begin to get into a nice, familiar routine. As stated a time or two in these posts, I tend to spend the first week to 10 days at my home office planning, scheduling and generally preparing to go out on the road for the remainder of the month.

Here are some of the activities I do to get ready for life on the road at the beginning of each month. Would love to hear you weigh in on things you might do as well.

• Receive an email with my assignments from the home office. Basically this is a list of buyers, prospective buyers, and others that we need to have some sort of face time with.
• I sort the list based upon geographical region contact is located in. Then I sort based upon priority. Does a particular client need me sooner rather than later? Does a prospect have demands that cause them to move up my list on when to visit? That sort of thing.
• Once my list is set, I then go about creating a travel plan. I have learned that some of the online travel/social sites can be a true benefit in this process. I started using Dopplr a couple of months ago (as you might be able to see with that widget-thing on the right side of the page).
• With a general itinerary set, I go about booking my actual flight travel, the business hotels I’ll stay at during the journey, and if I need a rental car I book those in advance as well.
• With travel needs taken care of, I then make sure I’ve got my toiletries in order. It is much easier and about 80% less expensive to make sure I don’t have to buy that stuff while on the road. I get that the businesses selling supplies to travelers are making a profit, but at the same time there is a lot of gouging going on for that bit of convenience. Don’t like that!
• Finally, I start to pack clothing, books, etc. If you’ve ever traveled extensively, you know that it can be hard to carry a lot more than a weeks worth of clean clothes. One of my little tricks is to make sure I have plenty of white under t-shirts as that can often allow me to wear a dress shirt 2 or 3 times prior to needing it laundered. This allows me to usually not have to have laundry done. The great things about most hotels, however, is they are right there should I need a shirt cleaned and pressed. This usually comes after a spill of some sort

I’ll leisurely move through the above list during the first week of the month. Once all is in order, I head out on the road and start providing my clients the best services I can. At this point, it’s all old hat to me. Would love to hear how you plan and prepare for your extended journeys. Have a great month!

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Alone. But don’t feel sorry for me. Please don’t! As I may have noted before, I’ve never really been the big holiday rah rah sort of guy. Especially when it concerns the industrialized, marketing driven holidays that seem so prevalent now days.

As I sit in my warm downtown Denver hotel room looking out over the city I realize why Valentine’s Day in particular has never been high on my list. Being on a lower floor during this stay (not my preference, but oh well) I’m able to watch a ton of couples head into or leave from a number of restaurants outside.

Valentine’s Day is soooo clearly a woman’s holiday. The poor saps that are emotionally connected to their female friends just get completely hoodwinked into participating in this so called holiday. It’s truly a terrible shame to watch the looks on the men’s faces.

By contrast, however, the women, for the most part, have expressions of joy. Glee even. LOL. Seriously. As I watch some of them I am literally chuckling out loud to no one in particular (but you, I suppose.)

One couple earlier where heading into an eatery. Perhaps I’m transferring my emotions onto the poor guy, but the look on his face screamed out in silence that he had just been hooked. Literally. She was repeatedly holding out her left hand to admire the ring. On the ring finger. Yeah, THAT FINGER!

Guessing the fellow had a nice job, I could actually see the shimmering and refraction off the stone. But if you could have seen the look on his face. OMG! I won’t say he was green and ready to puke, but without a doubt, this was not his favorite day on the planet. I’m sure that would change as he realized what he’d done.

And to be fair, when I saw them exit from their meal, he was clearly over the anxiety. Nothing beats a good meal to take the edge off and provide your brain with the blood sugar to more fully contemplate what the heck you just got yourself into.

I’ll be nice and wish them good luck. They are going to need it

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I’ve just checked out of my room at the LAX Airport hotel after a pleasant few days in the ever expanding metropolis of Los Angeles. Pretty sure that the surrealistic cityscape that was presented us in the movie Blade Runner is going to happen here in the near future.

I suppose the reason I’m saying that has to do a lot with the highways of the area. In Phoenix we have a lot of very new double, triple and I think there’s actually a spot in the Valley of the Sun that has 4 different levels of over/under passes going on.

Other than the few dense traffic regions in Arizona, everything is spread low, and extends far. When approaching LAX from San Diego earlier this week, I got a real eyeful. At certain points while flying up the coast you get to see how development has butted right up against the edge of the various mountains that protect and encapsulate the greater L.A and Orange County area.

My first flight into Los Angeles was as an 11 year old kid who was coming to visit his father and brother, for the first time. Yeah. Weird. I know. Our parents had divorced while I was in my second year, so I never really knew these people or the Left Coast where they resided.

But the one thing that struck me about flying into LAX was seeing all of the streets, buildings, the civilization that existed out here. It was amazing and overwhelming for a kid on his first ever plane ride. And a solo one at that! Pretty sure that was the best I’d ever been treated on a plane, but that’s a story for another post.

During the approach this time there was one thing that caught my eye. Off in the distance to the east you could actually see where the home developers were starting to carve out those bounding mountains I’d first observed protecting the area.

Now you could clearly see the excavations and massive terracing that was prepping those areas for yet more homes for more people to be able to live in the California sunshine.

While I’m not sure how high up on those hillsides they can build it was observing this that made me think on the Blade Runner future of Los Angeles. They are going to have to start building up if growth is to continue. I wonder how that will affect life here? How will the future affect all of our visits to the area.

Would love to hear if you have any thoughts on the concept, be it here in L.A. or your favorite travel destination. Be good to yourself!

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