Business Travel in Asia
It is always remarkable how little people, even senior executives, know about the world outside of their comfort zone. A recently promoted global head of sales who had never been to the region other than a brief holiday in his 20s wanted to come and do an all-office visit in the region to meet staff and customers. At the time, the company had offices in Mumbai, Bangalore, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong and Tokyo. He requested an itinerary leaving New York on Saturday after his kids had finished baseball and arriving back on the following Friday so he would be home for the next baseball game on Saturday morning. This is approximately 160 hours he was making available. Although pointing out that it was impractical, he still insisted on an itinerary, saying he was fine flying overnight!
Let’s look at this.
- New York to Mumbai - 18h 20m
- Mumbai to Bangalore - 1h 45m
- Bangalore to Singapore - 4h 35m
- Singapore to Sydney - 7h 50m
- Sydney to Melbourne - 1h 35m
- Melbourne to Hong Kong - 9h 50m
- Hong Kong to Tokyo - 4h 5m
- Tokyo to New York - 12h 45m
It ends up being 60h 45m of just flying time. Add in the 2 hours of transit to and from, plus waiting time at airports, adding another 32 hours, if the traffic is good. So we have 92 hours of just travelling. Throw in 1 hour per flight of personal ablutions, and you have 100 hours clocked. When confronted with this, he did relent. Which was a good thing as nobody in-Region wanted to travel with him as they knew a trip like that would leave you as a dribbling mess and would not have achieved little positive with staff and certainly not customers. And the jet lag would be frightening!
This region is big, even when only talking about the major centres, it becomes even harder when you add in some other countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and New Zealand. The reality is fly-in, fly-out visits just don’t work for anybody. It’s hard to relate to when your experience is US-centric, with some 7 hours to cross the country or Europe with London and 4 hours from Istanbul. Executive visits do add value to prospects and customers, but hands-on sales management remotely with occasional visits makes no sense.
