Road Warrior Guides Women

One major goal of many business travelers is to achieve “premium frequent flier status.” We engage in all sorts of shenanigans to try to bump our mileage up into the higher realms of elite status.

Not so Kathleen Ameche.

At the height of her business travel days, she was on the road as many as 200 nights a year. She would start each year with this New Year’s resolution: not to make Premier Executive status in the coming year, achieved by flying at least 50,000 miles per year in the United Mileage Plus frequent flier program.

It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the perks, it was that she dreaded the grind of another year of the intense travel required to earn it.

“In my true road warrior days, I was in the Sunday- or Monday-to-Friday grind,” she said. “That was before work-life balance was even thought about.”

Now as president of Ameche Group, she spends her days writing and speaking about how women can balance the demands of life when business travel is part of the work equation. Her book, “The Woman Road Warrior,” has been in bookstores for nearly a year, and she is at work on another, this time delving into the lives of female business travelers in other countries.

When I tracked her down, she had just returned to her home in Chicago from a two-day trip to Philadelphia and Washington, where she was invited to give a seminar on the needs of female business travelers by the Library of Congress.

I asked her how the issues of female business travelers differ from their male counterparts.

“It’s more of an awareness that women are different than men,” she said. “It isn’t that we want special treatment.”

The travel industry is coming late to the game in terms of selling their product to women, she said. It is behind the curve compared with other industries such as financial services and clothing that realize they must approach female customers differently, she said.

“Travel hasn’t gotten there yet,” she said. For example: “The statistics show that women are concerned about safety, but that doesn’t mean I want to be coddled.”

Requests as simple as a nonsmoking room not on the first floor of a hotel seem difficult for hotels to grasp. Businesswomen dining alone in restaurants are often shuffled back to a table next to the kitchen.

Among her travel pet peeves are flight attendants who bark orders at passengers to quickly stow their bags as they board a flight in an effort to make up time for a late departure. “I’m always amazed that women, especially flight attendants, don’t necessarily look out for their own,” she said. “You’d think we’d have this great club and we don’t.”

Life on the road is not without its light moments.

For Ameche, one occurred on a trip to Milwaukee. At about 10 o’clock at night, people started knocking on the door to her hotel room. Ever the conscientious traveler, Ameche did not open it. But as the knocks continued into the night, she learned that her room had been listed incorrectly as the hospitality suite for a large organization staying at the hotel.

“I didn’t open the door because I didn’t want them to say, ‘Look what the prize is,’ ” she said. “Needless to say, I changed rooms immediately.”

Ameche had a less amusing anecdote to tell about having a gun pulled on her -- by a cab driver. It was in the mid-1980s, and she had called a cab to pick her up at 6 a.m. for the ride from her home to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The time had changed recently, and it was still dark. At some point in the ride, the driver decided she was some sort of threat and pointed a gun at her while she sat in the back seat.

“I wasn’t sure if he wanted to rob me,” she said. “I was all by myself and had to decide, is it safer to get out on the expressway or to try to talk to this guy and hope I could get to O’Hare?”

She relied on her gut instinct and chose the latter and managed to calm him down and arrive safely at the airport where she gave him a big tip.

“He was delusional,” she said. He knew where she lived because he had picked her up at home. She figured that if it was money he was after, it was safer to give it to him at the airport rather than have him be disgruntled and return to her home and demand it at gunpoint. She still remembers the number of the cab.

Safety and security while traveling is a big issue for women.

“I recommend they be very aware of their surroundings and not put themselves in compromising positions,” she said.

The other tip she offers is to trust your instinct.

If your instincts tell you something is wrong with a hotel room or you’re uncomfortable walking down a street, don’t be afraid to ask for another room or adjust your route on a street.

You can reach James Gilden at james.gilden@latimes.com.