12 lessons learned from life on the road
Lesson No. 1: Travel is no fun. Really. If you think it's all about smiling stewardesses attending to your every whim, friendly hotels offering fawning service and romantic sunsets on the beach, it's time for a reality check. Your stewardess will probably stop smiling when you refer to her as one, because no one calls a flight attendant a stewardess and gets away with it today. Your hotel? They'll be pleasant until you check out. The moment you complain about that surprise $20-a-day resort fee or the $5 charge for receiving a fax, the grin on the manager's face will tighten into a grimace of icy resolve. You'll hear insincere apologies, but you will probably still pay. And the sunsets on the beach? Last time I went to the beach, there was a hurricane. The point is travel can be hard work. Travel can be hard, period. But when you do it for a living -- when you're a true blue, card-carrying, sleep-deprived business traveler -- you learn the ropes quickly. By the time you're a million-miler, and maybe sooner, you know travel isn't always fun but you also know travel can be tolerable. What lessons can you learn from these veterans of the road? I asked some of the most experienced travelers I know to tell me what traveling has taught them. Here are a dozen tips from them, in their own words: nice pays. and he was gone." Putting your travel purchases on a credit card offers you some protection. Margules could have disputed the charge and received a refund. just in case," says Sabatini, a publishing consultant in New York. 12 tips from the people who are in the know. Take their advice with you on your next trip, and you never know. You might actually have ... fun. |
