Welcome to the flght 666 on Absurd Air—sit back and enjoy the ride but first of all make sure your seat belt is securely fastened and your tray table is in an upright and locked position.
I am writing this while sitting on a 747 en route from Los Angeles to Melbourne, Australia. I left home just outside Cleveland, Ohio at 2.45pm on Thursday and will land in Melbourne at around 9.30am on Saturday – hopefully. Not sure where my Friday went, still I will make it all up again on Thursday when I leave Melbourne at 11.30am and land in LA at 10.40am, 50 minutes before I took off, en route back to Cleveland. Such is the glamor of traveling across the International Date Line.
In my 26 years as a management consultant I have taken 2,742 plane flights (yes I keep a record because that's what I do) through 188 different airports in 56 countries. The reason for the current trip is to deliver a couple of speeches at a performance management conference. While pondering the world of scorecards, dashboards and KPIs, I got to thinking about the key performance indicators of travel.
Our travel vendors love to boast about their rankings in surveys and always seem to focus on the one metric that shows them in the best light. Over the years this has led to some creative measurement. Apparently the 19-minute flight from Cleveland to Detroit flight now needs to be scheduled for 1 hour and 40 minutes in order to have a chance of achieving respectable on-time stats.
Of course, for those of us who are on the road all the time the sole metric for our travel is to maximize the accumulation of frequent flyer miles or other such rewards. Our choice of airline, rental car, hotel, restaurant and payment mechanism all seek to apply the maximum multiplier to each mile covered or dollar spent. I will freely admit that in my younger days I engaged in some less than optimal logistics for December travel to secure the next level of elite status—Cleveland to Newark via Houston anyone?
Back in the late-1980s during my days working in London we maintained a league table that documented another metric reflective of the consultant’s itinerant life. The metric was simple: Average Speed for the Week. The calculation took the total miles covered in a week and divided it by 168 to give a “mph.” Suffice to say that on at least a couple of occasions I managed to top the 100mph for the week without getting so much as a speeding ticket.
However, over time the pursuit of insane travel statistics loses its luster. If in doubt then watch the movie Up In The Air, I am sure you will notice the uncanny resemblance between George Clooney and yours truly! Today my priorities have changed. Travel planning involves maximum use of non-stops at off peak times; and avoiding tight connections in Chicago, Atlanta or Newark at all costs while maximizing the chance of upgrades over mileage accumulation and choosing hotels based on the comfort of the beds, efficiency of the shower and proximity to client site/airport rather than their coolness quotient. Of course, when all is said and done there is only one metric that actually matters when it comes to air travel and that is to make sure that Landings Equal Takeoffs, everything else is secondary.
Assuming that this metric holds for this flight, I am looking forward to a few days in Melbourne, it's a great city and in less than 24 hours I will have swapped fall in Ohio for springtime in Oz, will have access to decent beer (after all American beer is an oxymoron), and will be able to enjoy extended coverage of the Rugby World Cup.
Till the next time, have one for the road.
PS. I did it! My weeklong trip to Australia covered 19,946 miles for an average speed of 118.73 mph.
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