Business travel is very different from traveling for vacation. When you are traveling for work, the objective isn’t necessarily to find the cheapest flight, the nicest hotel, or the perfect restaurant. The goal is to get where you need to be, arrive on time, have everything you need, and be ready to work.
After enough time in airports, rental cars, hotels, and unfamiliar cities, frequent business travelers tend to develop their own systems. Some are surprisingly simple, but they can make a significant difference when you’re traveling several times a month.
We recently spoke with an avid business traveler with Truman Mox, a nationwide machinery and equipment appraisal firm whose work frequently requires travel to client facilities and industrial sites throughout the country. He shared several of the habits that make life on the road considerably easier.
Keep a Second Set of Chargers in Your Travel Bag
One of his simplest recommendations was also one of his favorites: stop packing your chargers.
Instead, buy another set.
Keep a dedicated phone charger, laptop charger, watch charger, charging cables, and other frequently needed electronics permanently in your travel bag. The same strategy can be used for basic toiletries.
Frequent travelers often use this approach because it reduces the number of things that have to be remembered before every trip. Dedicated travel kits containing chargers and other essentials are also commonly recommended by experienced business travelers.
When it’s time to leave, you shouldn’t have to crawl behind your desk looking for your laptop charger.
Your bag should already be ready.
Avoid Checking Luggage Whenever Practical
For a typical one- or two-night business trip, a carry-on is usually enough.
Checking a bag introduces another variable into a trip. You have to arrive early enough to check it, wait for it after landing, and deal with the possibility that your luggage doesn’t arrive when you do.
That last issue becomes considerably more important when you’re traveling for business. Losing your clothes on vacation is inconvenient. Losing your business attire the night before an important client meeting is a much bigger problem.
Business-travel packing guides frequently recommend keeping critical work items and clothing in carry-on luggage for exactly this reason.
There are obviously trips where checked luggage is unavoidable, but for short trips, learning to travel efficiently with a carry-on can save a surprising amount of time over the course of a year.
Choose Your Hotel Based on Where You Need to Be in the Morning
A common mistake is selecting a hotel based primarily on price, amenities, or proximity to the airport.
For business travel, there is another question that may be more important:
Where do you need to be at 8:00 tomorrow morning?
A hotel that is 10 minutes from your client can be much more valuable than a slightly nicer hotel located 35 minutes away. That difference becomes particularly noticeable in cities with unpredictable morning traffic.
Experienced travelers often plan backward. Start with the location of the meeting, conference, plant, jobsite, or client facility and then look for an acceptable hotel nearby. Current business-travel recommendations similarly emphasize hotel location and total door-to-door travel time rather than simply selecting the lowest room rate.
An extra 30 minutes of sleep can be worth considerably more than a better hotel lobby.
Keep One Complete Business Outfit Protected
Another useful habit is to treat one outfit as untouchable.
If your trip involves fieldwork, plant tours, construction sites, equipment inspections, or other activities where clothes can get dirty, keep your next client-facing outfit separate from everything else.
Don’t wear tomorrow’s pants to dinner because they’re convenient. Don’t use your only clean shirt because your flight was cold.
Keep one complete outfit protected until you need it.
This also provides some insurance against spills, weather, unexpected schedule changes, or the addition of an extra meeting to the trip.
When the Meeting Matters, Give Yourself an Escape Route
The most important advice from our Truman Mox traveler concerned flight schedules.
If you absolutely have to be somewhere, don’t book the last flight that can possibly get you there.
Book the itinerary that gives you options when something goes wrong.
For an important morning meeting, arriving the evening before is generally preferable to flying in that morning. When same-day travel is necessary, taking an earlier flight can leave additional flights available if yours is delayed or canceled.
This isn’t just anecdotal advice. Business-travel guidance commonly recommends early-day flights, additional buffer time, and arriving the night before important meetings because delays later in the day can leave travelers with fewer recovery options.
The difference is simple.
If your 7:00 a.m. flight is canceled, you may still have several ways to reach your destination.
If your 7:00 p.m. flight is canceled and you have an 8:00 a.m. meeting the next morning, your options can disappear quickly.
Make Business Travel Boring
Perhaps the best business travel strategy is to remove as many decisions and variables as possible.
Use the same suitcase. Keep chargers and toiletries packed. Develop a basic packing routine. Know where you’re staying before you land. Keep critical items with you. And whenever the business purpose of the trip is important, build some margin into your itinerary.
None of these tricks will make a delayed flight take off any faster.
What they can do is prevent a relatively small travel problem from becoming a business problem.
And after enough years traveling for work, that becomes the real objective: not making every trip perfect, but making sure you’re prepared when it isn’t.
