Executive Travel : When Anything and Everything Goes Wrong

There are those who think business travel is glamorous, a free ride to exotic places on the company’s tab.

And there are those who know differently.

This story is about them--the ones who have to go on the road frequently for their companies and have the ulcers to show for it.

Many people don’t understand how stressful business travel can be, seasoned road warriors say.

Indeed, when Dallas-based Hotel Crescent Court recently ran a contest to find the most stressed business traveler in the country, it was overwhelmed with responses, hotel spokeswoman Kimberly Artcher said. More than 200 people wrote in with tales of woe, ranging from missed appointments to heart attacks. One person even sent in divorce papers, she said.

According to the great majority of the contest entries, screwed-up logistics are the primary cause of travel stress. Sixteen percent cited tight schedules as a cause, 15% said it was time spent away from home, and 12% said it was time away from the office.

Picking the most stressed-out among the respondents was tough, Artcher said, but the nod finally went to Rita Carver, a senior vice president of Resource Development Inc. in Texas, a nonprofit management consulting firm. Carver takes about 50 trips a year and typically spends 18 to 20 days a month on the road.

In her entry, she described a much-delayed 11-hour plane trip from Dallas to New York.

But that wasn’t the most stressful part.

As Carver was getting dressed to meet her client the next morning, she discovered a critical error. “Yes, I had brought my black heels,” she wrote, “but in my rush the day before, had packed one with a two-inch heel and another with a three-inch heel.”

“I spent the next nine hours with my client walking to the proposed building sites trying to appear professional and minimize the effect of one leg being longer than the other. Each time we stopped for a discussion, I creatively struck a new pose: the penguin, with the right foot extended to the side looking like a flipper; the flamingo, with one leg tucked up. Lucky for me, we only stopped twice. I was running out of ideas.”

And that wasn’t the end of the nightmare.

Her return flights were canceled because of snow, there was no hotel at the airport and taxi drivers were scarce and surly.

She finally arrived home “three days, two shoes and seven attempted flights later” only to be greeted by a 13-year-old daughter yelling, “Mom, can you take me shopping?”

Asked how it felt to be named “most stressed business traveler,” Carver replied, “I felt very qualified.”

In fact, the week she was notified that she was the lucky contest winner, she had just returned from a business trip to Houston, where not one rental car was to be found while government workers were in town inspecting flood damage.

“After a while, you can’t take it so seriously,” Carver said of business travel.

Some other harrowing stories from entrants:

* Bill Birnbaum, a management consultant from Costa Mesa, told of a turbulent cross-country flight in which he sat next to a woman who appeared on the verge of losing her lunch most of the way.

* L.M. Stanley, a sales manager for Eaten Foods Co. in Vineland, N.J., described being met at a baggage claim area by two armed security guards. It seems drug-sniffing security dogs had attacked his baggage, which was packed with food samples.

* Brian Martin, a consultant for Total Engineering Services Team in Gretna, La., said he was traveling from a city in southeastern Russia during a snowstorm when his bus kept sliding off the road. Finally the driver had all the passengers get off, shovel snow with their hands, then push the bus back onto the road.

* M.J. Parker, president of Engineering & Construction Services in Orlando, Fla., told of being the lone female traveler on an airplane in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Customs there call for women to travel separately from men, so she had to ride in the cockpit and be transported alone in a car to her hotel while her male colleagues took a bus.

* Brian Schomacker, general manager of Vanderbilt Inn on the Gulf in Naples, Fla., described a trip to Colombia in which he forgot to have his passport stamped on arrival. As he tried to leave, immigration officials detained him until he signed a confession saying he had entered the country illegally. He also had to pay $75.

* Browning C. Hull, a sales manager for Burton Rubber Processing in Burton, Ohio, intended to go to the vending machine at the end of the hall in his hotel. But he locked himself out of his room--in his underwear.

First-runner-up honors went to Sharie Lieberg, client support specialist for Medical Management Systems in Calabasas, who said the phrase trip from hell doesn’t begin to describe what she encountered last year on a business trip to Michigan.

“This particular trip was everything I ever dreaded,” she said. “I don’t know if it was a harmonic convergence or what, but it really brought out my paranoid streak.”

In the preface to her application, she wrote: “The Travel Gods are easily bored. Jaded to routine supplications for safe trips and smooth landings, these Journey Deities have been known to conduct wagers among themselves to see how much havoc they can wreak.”

To start, on her departing flight she sat next to a televangelist. Between knocking back Scotches and trying to convert her, she said, he kept “hitting up on me, then hitting me up for donations.”

Naturally, the airline misplaced her bags.

“I ended up going to meet a client in dirty clothes, looking like I’d been hit by a truck,” she said. Then she stepped in a pothole and twisted her ankle. When she finally got her luggage, a full bottle of Maalox had spilled all over her new suit.

People just don’t understand how tough it is, Lieberg said. When she called home, her husband responded with a litany of his own woes: “I forgot to buy milk and cat food, and he can’t find the checkbook. Our older son is freaking out because I forgot to sign a form confirming what I will make for their class bake sale. The cat has gone into heat. The water heater is leaking. Our younger son is coming down with a cold.”

But somehow you muddle through and things look up again, she said. Three months later, she’d won the account. The cleaners had restored her suit to its former glory. The cat had a litter of five. Her ankle doesn’t give out when she walks anymore.

And the boss just asked her to visit another new client in Indiana.

“The boss is a sadist,” she said. “I just hope the Travel Gods aren’t feeling bored again.”