On July 14, 2009, the Economist reported on British Airways’ Face-of-Opportunity contest to fly for free 1000 business people from New York, Los Angeles or Chicago to London. This contest was triggered by BA’s fears that business trips might face extinction. According to the Economist, business and first class passenger numbers have fallen by 17% industry-wide in 2009 while the use of personal conferencing technology is up significantly. As an example they cite Proctor & Gamble, which claims that the use of video collaboration in their 30 TelePresence centers replaced roughly 10,000 flights (and it is rumored that P&G’s travel budget was reduced by 15-25%).
I don’t doubt P&G’s numbers, but I’m not sure you will see the same kind of savings and technology adoption rates in your business. Here’s why:
- Personal communication tools are great in one-to-one situations and will yield quite some savings there. The same cannot be said for meetings where a dozen or more people from 6 different locations attend.
- In this economy, companies are cutting cost as fast as they can. One measure very high on everyone’s list: Cut Office cost. Telecommuting has been encouraged, offices have been downsized. If you watch Cisco’s TelePresence ads, you typically see a conference between people in two offices. However, chances are people are not just in two offices. There’s always someone participating from home or a hotel room, while another person is in an airport with no Wi-Fi access, but lots of background noise instead. In situations like these, audio conferences via telephone is the lowest common denominator.
- Video conferencing technology has become much easier to use, even while traveling, but the quality can be quite low. Have you ever hosted a teleconference in the U.S, where people from different continents attended at the same time? Some from home, some from the office, some while they were traveling? Even with today’s technology, the results are typically nothing to write home about.
- Most importantly, as outlined in my post “Face-To-Face Communication is still most valued by business travelers“, certain things can only be achieved by personally meeting your customers.
I would encourage you to embrace personal communication methods – it is amazing what is available today. At FlyMiwok, we are using quite a few, even some that did not exist last year. But you should not fool yourself that technology will replace the necessity to travel. It will not.
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While I agree in principle with your assertion that business travel will not become extinct, I take exception to three out of four of the points you use to illustrate your case. http://bit.ly/aZMyW
Thanks for the discussion!
Details of my response can be found under comments at http://bit.ly/aZMyW
Great comments. Thanks.
I agree that the ultimate answer is not technology, per se, but the evolution of behavior and culture to take advantage of the technology. To that point, someone who would exert the energy to travel but can not make the necessary preparations to successfully collaborate electronically has a clear opportunity to evolve. I believe that that workers who make these behavioral changes will be very valuable assets – travel is unlikely to become cheaper, easier, or more environmentally friendly any time soon! (Although the solutions offered by FlyMiwok are undoubtedly superior.)
Thanks again for the discourse! Next time let’s use video!
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