BURSTING THE BUSINESS TRAVEL BUBBLE
Intercontinental business travel, with first-class tickets, five-star hotels and transfers by taxi, is not most people's idea of a hard life. But at the wrong time, and in the wrong place, it can be. At the least, the resulting jet-lag will blur the brain at a crucial time, and enough of it can be a major cause of executive burn-out.
Behind the airlines' crafted images of almond-eyed beauties service iced bubbly and Russian caviar there is the other side to business travel.
It is a story of idle hours in hostile airports; sleepless nights next to chattering bores; and whitening knuckles in turbulent storms.
But it seems that the more flights one makes, the greater the chance that a really nasty experience will almost certainly occur, as several leading financiers and businessmen explained to Euromoney.
It would be hard to match the ordeal suffered by David Poole, chief executive of ANZ Merchant Bank, when he was forced to travel through South America on a local carrier, which he boarded in Bogota.
He recalled: "The aircraft was an uncomfortable little turboprop with a mad Spanish pilot.