Impact of Teleconferencing on Travel

Question: What effect will the communications revolution have on business travel in the future? Will routine business travel be eliminated by teleconferencing among managers of corporations?

Answer: The concept of teleconferencing sends shivers through people in the travel industry. They worry that business people will start holding their meetings electronically instead of traveling to hold face-to-face encounters. If that were to happen, restaurateurs would get a terminal case of indigestion, airline stocks would plummet and hotel keepers would seek other lines of work.

While it’s clear that electronic communications will have an impact on business travel, there probably is no need for panic in the travel industry in the near future.

Teleconferencing is not a single technology but a number of quite different ways for people to meet electronically. The simplest and best-known teleconferencing technique is the telephone conference call, in which a telephone operator links three or more telephones so that a number of parties can discuss a matter of mutual concern.

Adding a Visual Element

Another type of teleconferencing--video-conferencing--adds the visual dimension to such a hookup. The parties on the line can see as well as talk to each other. Video-conferencing is still quite expensive because it requires satellite TV transmission.

In the future the cost of videoconferencing is likely to fall, and as more businesses obtain the required facilities, it may become a normal way of conducting business. Video-conferencing can bring together people at scattered locations around the world: A New York executive could discuss problems with his Hong Kong factory chiefs. A French Champagne producer could describe his latest vintage to distributors around the world and respond to their questions.

Video-conferencing may play an increasingly important role in government, education and other areas too. From the White House, President Reagan has used this technique to speak to thousands of campaign workers around the country and tossed the coin to start this year’s Super Bowl game via a video-conference hookup with players and officials on the field in Palo Alto, Calif. In the years ahead a superintendent of schools will be able to speak to teachers in many different schools; a mayor might talk to police in stations scattered around the city.

Another form of teleconferencing is computer conferencing. It involves maintaining in a computer a continuous record of comments and questions on any given topic from many people all over the world. They can look at the conference record whenever they want and immediately enter comments or questions they wish other conference participants to be aware of.

If this sounds like something you would have no use for, better reserve judgment for the moment. In the years ahead there probably will be ongoing computer conferences on almost every subject, including some that you are interested in. The topic could be Mozart’s sonatas, Robert Frost’s poems, recipes for oysters, whitewater rafting.

A computer conference is an ideal way for a widely scattered group of people to share their enthusiasm and knowledge of a particular subject, or solve their problems, for fun or profit. It need not be a tool just for business people and scholars. For example, if you needed to fix a leaky faucet, you might be able to plug into a computer conference and locate an expert who can tell you how to do the job.

In its more popular usage, a computer conference is known as a computer bulletin board. Ruth Davis, a San Francisco management consultant writing in the Futurist magazine (published by the World Future Society, 4916 St. Elmo Ave., Bethesda, Md. 20814), reports that teen-agers “conference” via computers on a daily basis. One of the most active computer bulletin boards is Teen Line in San Diego, Calif. The bulletin board’s operator--the person responsible for running and maintaining the system--is a 13-year-old girl.

“By using their microcomputers to talk for hours, teen-agers are becoming acclimated to the technology they will be using in their working future,” says Davis.

So will electronic meetings reduce business travel? Not if the impact of the telephone on business travel is any guide. After the phone was introduced in the 19th Century, people traveled more, not less.