Do you remember showing up at the gate of an arriving airline flight, so that when a friend, business colleague, or family member disembarked, you were there to greet him or her? Did you ever have the experience of flying first-class on a transatlantic Pan Am flight, and enjoy being served a five-course meal on real china, with real silverware, in the upstairs cabin of a Boeing 747? Do you remember how important it was to find a bank of pay phones with AT&T or MCI long-distance service (as opposed to FlyByNight Telecommunications) so that you could use your telephone credit card (which you remembered even more clearly than your Social Security Number) to make modestly-priced long-distance phone calls during the layover between flights? Do you remember … well, you get the point. And here’s the real point of these little vignettes, and dozens others like them: my three grown children don’t remember any of them, except through the vicarious experience of hearing about the “good old days” from their crotchety parents. And my young grandson is about as far removed from these experiences as he is from the Pony Express, carbon paper (links provided for inquisitive members of the younger generation) , and Western Union (which I remember using on a regular basis, when it was too expensive to call clients in Europe or Australia).

From this perspective, this blog posting is merely a snapshot in time, a small vignette of what business travel is like in late 2006. For other business travelers at this same point in time, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it; like all business trips these days, it had its high moments and low moments. But if this blog survives another ten years, I’ll be curious to see whether my children, grandchildren, or I think any of it is quaint, obsolete, or still “normal.” There’s no question that many of the services, accessories, and experiences in today’s travel world would have seemed quite exotic to me 20-30 years ago. But it’s also sad to see how many things that we took for granted (like strolling up to an airline gate to meet an arriving passenger, even if I wasn’t a ticketed passenger myself), or appreciated as quite special (like the Pan Am dinner flights to London), have now faded away — most likely never to be seen again.

I started musing about all of this a couple days ago, when I embarked upon what was supposed to be two back-to-back business trips to Miami, interspersed in the middle of the week with a day of personal appointments in New York. The Sunday-night flight from LaGuardia to Miami was packed, with every seat occupied, as most of them seem to be these days; when I asked the gate agent if there was any chance of a frequent-flyer upgrade to first class, she grimaced and gave me a look that said, “Don’t be ridiculous; you’re just wasting your time, dude.” So I got on the plane, and — as I’ve done for over 20 years — promptly fell asleep, and remained unconscious for the entire 3-hour flight. Consequently, I avoided the insulting experience of being offered a $4 “snack pack” consisting of crackers, cheese, a small candy bar, and a couple of other tid-bits of junk food. There was a time when stuff like this would have been part of the free snacks, before an overcooked meal of soggy pasta, rubber chicken, or mystery meat; but those days are long gone. But, hey, the basics were just fine on this flight: it left on time, it arrived on time, and it avoided bumpy weather enroute.

I stayed at the Miami Intercontinental on this trip, which I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting before; it’s a great hotel, overlooking Biscayne Bay, and I highly recommend it for business travelers. Since so many hotels manage to lose reservations these days (like the Jersey City Hyatt Regency, which managed to lose my confirmed early-morning check-in after a redeye flight from California, and which I will never stay in again, for the rest of my life), I make it a point to call the hotel a day before my business trips, just to make sure that the anonymous voice on the other end of the phone can confirm that my reservation still exists. No problems with the Intercontinental: the confirmation was fine; the checkin was fast, friendly, and efficient; and the room was spacious and clean. There was a 24-hour fitness center, which was great, but one small hitch: if you wanted to exercise early in the morning or late at night, you had to first go down to the front desk to get a separate key. This struck me as odd: all of the keys were the typical electronic credit-card kind of devices, which means they had magnetic stripes encoded with whatever information the hotel needed to keep track of me as a guest. So why give me a second one, especially since neither key had any externally-visible identification or distinguishing marks. How could I tell which key was which? Well, with the benefit of a college education, I finally decided to put one key in my left pocket, and one key in my right pocket; still, I couldn’t help wondering whether this was a “feature” of all Intercontinental hotels, or just a quirk in its Miami facility.

Similarly, when I looked for a high-speed Internet connection in the room, I found that they had both an Ethernet connection and a wireless connection. I was feeling lazy, so I prepared myself to accept the usual daily charge of ten, twelve, or perhaps even 15 dollars for the service. But the login procedure informed me that I would have to make a phone call to the front desk in order to receive a personalized PIN number. Huh? This is almost as backwards as the hotels I’ve visited in Amsterdam and Rome earlier this year, where a personal visit to the front desk was often necessary in order to receive the cryptic code that would enable Internet access for a day. Most American hotels these days simply add the daily charge to the room bill, making it trivially easy for lazy people like me to incur the cost; it’s annoying when you find that you’re dealing with an Internet service provider that has no connection with the hotel, and insists that you type your credit card number, home address, phone number, and half a dozen other pieces of personal data. But a call to the front desk? Bah, humbug! I sighed, and pulled out my Verizon broadband-modem card, plugged it into the side of my laptop, and was connected — independently of the hotel — in a matter of seconds. Of course, I should have done that from the very beginning; but the hotel’s quirky behavior cost them $10 they could easily have earned from me.

Still, this is all quite nit-picky: the point is that in addition to my own independent means of Internet access, the hotel provided two reasonable mechanisms (WiFi and Ethernet) for getting online. And of course, that’s been true in almost every first-class business hotel — not to mention a large number of Motel-6 and Holiday-Inn level hotels — for nearly five years. Not to have such service is roughly equivalent to not having electricity or a shower in the room. On the other hand, the electricity is “free,” as is the shower; its price is bundled into the overall cost of the room, so the hotel guest doesn’t have to be annoyed by seeing it as a separate item. I wonder how many more years it will take before Internet access is treated the same way; my personal experience is that less than 25% of the hotels around the U.S. provide free Internet service. (On the other hand, perhaps 5-10 years from now, everyone will have their own personal mechanism for accessing the Internet, in which case the hotel’s mechanism will become just as irrelevant as their overly-expensive landline phones are today. When’s the last time you made a long-distance call from a landline phone in a hotel room?)

Anyway, having sorted out these details, I turned in early so that I could get up at 5 AM and have time for a good session in the fitness center before starting a day’s work. After the slightly annoying side trip to the front desk to get the special key, I walked into the fitness center at 5:45 — and found that there were already half a dozen other guests busily running, cycling, lifting weights, and flailing about with grim determination. By the time I left at 7:30, there were well over a dozen people, and all of the treadmills were occupied. Fortunately, the Intercontinental’s fitness center is large and spacious, with plenty of room between machines; there were plenty of towels, and separate locker rooms for men and women. I’ve been in hotels — including some on the level of Hiltons, Marriotts, and Hyatts — where the fitness centers have been about the size of a broom closet, and where one or more of the machines were broken. And I’ve been in some — notably the O’Hare Airport Hilton in Chicago — that were two or three times more crowded than the Miami Intercontinental. Twenty years ago, none of this really mattered to business travelers; maybe it mattered ten years ago, but I wasn’t very conscientious about exercising at the time. Now it matters to me, and to everyone else; and one of the key items that I check on a hotel website, before deciding whether to stay in hotel A, B, or C in a new city, is the page describing their fitness center. I have a feeling that these facilities will gradually become better and better, in the years to come.

Having exercised, showered, dressed, and eaten, I headed off to my client’s office for what was supposed to be two days of work, then a quick return to New York, and two more days in Miami at the end of the week. But unexpected events arose, as they so often do in the business world, and by mid-afternoon of the first day, it was clear that the rest of the week’s meetings would have be canceled, and rescheduled for early January. As every business traveler knows, changes like this create a chain of events, as well as a few key questions. The first is: what alternative flights should I consider, and are there any seats on those flights? In the good old days, this required only one toll-free phone call, to a human being whose knowledge of the travel industry was of paramount importance when sudden changes to the itinerary were necessary: a travel agent. Well, those days are obviously long gone, and we’re all on our own now.

Because this is such a common event, I pre-program my Palm Pilot with all available flights to and from my destination, as part of a checklist of items on the day before my trip. Obviously, you can do this online — if you have an Internet connection. But if you’re sitting in a client’s office, with firewall security mechanisms expressly designed to prevent visitors from getting on their network (more about that in a moment), then you’re left with the option of using your cell phone to call the airline you originally thought would take you home, and see if they have any alternatives. I don’t bother with that any more; I used a program called WorldMate Pro, from Mobimate, to give me a list of all flights, on all airlines, on the day of departure, and the day of return; it requires Internet access to retrieve the information and download it onto my Palm Pilot, but once I’ve got it, I can access it offline. Once I see what my options are, then I can call the appropriate airline(s) to see what availability they have. I’m sure there are other ways to accomplish all of this, but it’s pretty straightforward; all it requires is a little planning before the trip begins, in anticipation of unexpected changes. Of course, a change like this also requires canceling whatever flights and reservations have already been set up; in my case, it required canceling a hotel reservation, an airline reservation, and a reservation for a car service that was scheduled to take me to the airport for the second half of my trip. Three simple phone calls on my cell phone, no big deal; but I couldn’t help wishing that an “intelligent agent” could have taken care of all of this automatically, without my having to remember which reservations had to be canceled. Once upon a time, it would have been automatic: it was called a travel agent.

One last detail about the business meeting, before we move on to the airport for the return flight home. As mentioned above, most business organizations today have fairly extensive firewalls, passwords, and other forms of security to prevent unauthorized access to the internal corporate network. That’s all quite understandable, but it’s also quite a nuisance for invited guests and visitors who plan on spending a day within the corporate environment. I’m surprised by how few businesses provide a “public” WiFi access, their reception area and/or designated conference rooms, for such occasions. Indeed, that’s one of the main reasons I originally acquired my Verizon broadband modem; even if I could access the Internet via the client’s protected network, I didn’t want them looking at the email messages I was sending, or the websites I was visiting (yes, I can use SSL-encrypted email; but I’m not so sure about the website accesses). Anyway, my Miami client did provide a public WiFi access, which I found quite civilized.

Okay, so the trip has been rescheduled; I’ve canceled all the necessary reservations, found a convenient flight home, checked out of my hotel, and hopped into a taxi for the ride back out to Miami airport. Nothing special here, other than the surprising extent of bumper-to-bumper gridlock; I was really happy I had allowed a full hour for the taxi ride, even though it would normally take less than half an hour. Once at the airport, I checked in at the online kiosk system at American Airlines, for one simple reason: there really wasn’t any option, unless you had a first-class ticket. I was flying economy, and desperately hoping for a frequent-flyer upgrade; to my surprise, I actually got one, and was ready to head for the security line.

This whole business of checking in at the airport has undergone quite a few changes since the awful events of September 11, 2001; but the kiosk system for getting a boarding pass, and checking baggage, seems to have settled down fairly nicely. I had to admit that I avoided using the kiosks for several months after they were first introduced; they tended to be overcrowded and often malfunctioned, and I simply wasn’t sure I trusted them. But I now use them regularly with American, Delta, United, and a few other lesser airlines; and with occasional exceptions, they’re fast, efficient, and user-friendly (e.g., you can even use them to apply for a one-day pass at the airline’s frequent-traveler lounge). I see these devices continuing to improve, and add new functionality; indeed, they’ll probably acquire all of the functionality once reserved exclusively for the ticket agents behind the desk, who had to memorize all of those cryptic codes for the SAABRE system, and others of its ilk.

There are a couple of things that are still a nuisance, though, especially in the post-9/11 world: baggage and the metal-detector. If my trip is only a couple days long, I prefer to carry my baggage on-line; but after the rumored terrorist incident in London during the summer of 2006, that now requires packing small tubes of toothpaste, shampoo, and other toiletries, into a clear zip-lock bag. And I’ve noticed on my last few trips that the passageway up to the metal detector now requires walking past a serious-looking guard who sits behind a large table filled with exhibits of disallowed liquid containers: bottles of water, large tubes of shampoo, and dozens of other mysterious items that may be instantly recognizable to fashionable women travelers, but not to simple-minded klutzes like me. The whole security system seems quite bizarre to me, and every time we get used to a particular set of procedures (do we take our shoes off, or leave them on? what about belt buckles? can laptops go in the same tray as the clear plastic zip-lock bag of toothpaste?), they change again. I can’t help wondering whether we’ll still be going through such rituals ten years from now; sometimes I think the whole thing will be abandoned, and other times I think we’ll all fly naked, using a separate service like Federal Express to ship our luggage. On the other hand, I think metal detectors, and the fundamental policy of allowing only ticketed passengers into the boarding area, has been with us for over 20 years now, ever since the airplane hijackings in the early 1980s; so maybe we’re stuck with this forevermore.

Because the airline food is not awful these days, but downright non-existent, I spent more time and energy than ever before trying to get a decent meal before get on the plane; and this has become more practical since 9/11, because you have to get to the airport an hour or two before the flight, so there’s plenty of time to eat. In the old days, it was hard to find anything but junk-food outlets and smoke-filled bars in airports; things have definitely improved in most airports today. Well, things weren’t quite so good in Miami — at least not in whatever section of the huge, rambling airport I found myself in. There was a Burger King, a Starbucks, a sleazy bar, a depressing Cuban restaurant, and a noisy bar/grill known as the Jose Cuervo Tequileria — with a large sign at the front entrance that said, “All work and no play means you’re missing the point.”

Well, it was the last restaurant along the long path from the check-in area to the gate, so I decided to take my chances. There were seven different brands of tequila on the menu, along with margaritas and other specialty drinks (slippers and slappers, whatever they may be ), every conceivable form of Mexican food … and some spicy crabcakes, surrounded by a fresh salad. I skipped the tequila, and stuck with a Diet Coke; together with the spicy crabcake, it turned out to be quite edible. As usual in such places, televisions blared in every corner; Lou Dobbs was throwing a minor tantrum on CNN, complaining about the state of illegal immigration. Three or four people pounded away on their laptop computers while munching on tacos, quesadillas, and taco chips; and a few others did their best to focus on paperback novels they had picked up in the adjoining newspaper shop. I suspect that if I return to this same location ten years from now, it will be a different style of restaurant — but the noise level will be the same, and the restaurant patrons will be behaving the same way. The only thing that’s really different these days is that in some restaurants — and possibly even some other, as-yet undiscovered part of Miami airport — you can sit down at a quiet restaurant, and order a really decent meal. I’ve enjoyed such meals at airports in Chicago, New York, Washington, and San Francisco, to name a few; I suspect it will become universal, sooner or later.

After dinner, I wandered up to the American Airlines Admiral’s Club for a little while. Like most airline clubs these days, it provides a commercial (T-Mobile Hotspot) WiFi service; and it’s got the usual amenities of snacks, drinks, work-cubicles, etc. The WiFi mechanism has been available for a few years now, and the latest addition seems to be half a dozen full-sized, publicly-available desktop PC’s. One was broken, but the rest were being used by people who were obviously getting some serious work done; no video games or mindless Web-surfing was evident. All of this used to be much more important to me a few years ago, but with my cell phone, my BlackBerry, and my Verizon broadband modem card, I’m no longer as dependent on the airline clubs. The snacks are still great, and several of them now offer a fairly complete menu (if you consider a pastrami sandwich, or chicken caesar salad, a “complete” menu); and they’re still a lot more quiet and peaceful than the crowded ruckus one usually finds out in the main terminal. Also, there’s one additional advantage of the airline clubs, as Christopher Elliott observes in a November 28, 2006 New York Times article entitled “The Socket Seekers“: in the main terminal area, you can rarely find an AC outline for charging your computer or cell phone, but they’re plentiful in the airline clubs.

Anyway, that was pretty much the end of the abortive Miami trip. Our flight boarded about 15 minutes late because of minor weather conditions somewhere between Miami and New York; and once again, the flight was completely full. But this time, I had a comfortable first-class seat, and I fell asleep even faster. I didn’t wake up until we were on our final descent into LaGuardia, and I fell asleep once again as I crawled into a taxi for the drive back into Manhattan.

If I had to guess, I’d say that probably half of my experiences on this trip will remain roughly the same a decade from now. Hopefully, some of the inconveniences and annoyances will fade away; but it’s depressing to think that some of it might actually get worse than today….