Why Do We Travel?

As a business traveler who also enjoys vacation travel, I took a few moments this week to ponder the actual nature of travel. When I really examined the subject, it was clearly sorted into two separate categories: traveling to places / events where I wanted to be, and traveling to places / events where I needed to be.

Travel is desirable for many reasons. First of all, exploring new places enriches the soul. There is tremendous value in experiencing the small changes to our routine that travel requires. These can include seeing beautiful (and not so beautiful) places; experiencing how other people live; sampling what other people eat; taking the time one wouldn’t normally have in a daily schedule to do things just for fun or entertainment; and many more. New experiences can be the spices that make our lives a more special thing to savor.

When returning from a trip where we wanted to be, we are often mentally refreshed and more able to manage our day-to-day routine – even to the point of missing it no matter how terrific the travel was.

I personally grew up in a family that for one reason or another never took vacations. Because of this (I’m sure) I dragged my family to the other end of the spectrum. From the ages of three onward, my kids knew they were growing up in a world where they could wake up in the morning in one city/country and be having dinner in another one. Travel for them became the normal routine that it became for me only after becoming a young adult. It is a small world after all, and having them learn what that meant for future possibilities was very important to me. My family’s vacations included seeing Four Corners, Red Rock and the Grand Canyon, splashing in the Pacific Ocean on the California coast, picking and eating pineapple and papaya in Hawaii, climbing up the Tower of London and the Arc de Triomphe, renewing my vows on the Starship Enterprise (D), and many, many other experiences – including those unavoidable, exhausting and totally wonderful theme park visits.

Traveling to places where we want to go is fantastic.

Traveling to places where we have to go is quite another story.

By my quick calculation (about three decades, about forty-eight weeks a year, about two hours a day) I’ve spent around three-thousand hours going back and forth “to work.” That’s just over a year of my life spent waiting to be where I supposedly needed to be to make a living – and that only includes routine commuting. It doesn’t include the hours spent waiting at an airport in security lines, at the gate, and in airplanes flying to some business meeting that everyone felt I had to be at in person – but honestly really didn’t. 

Traveling to meet colleagues or clients, to break-bread with them, and/or to develop a relationship is clearly worthwhile. Traveling to inspect a site for future or in-progress work is also clearly necessary. However, traveling to be at a “meeting” with people I already know, to interview a candidate or a contractor, or to do any other task that can be easily replaced with technology is just crazy, and has been made even more so as technology continues to improve. 

As I’ve written before, the realization that we humans don’t need to travel unnecessarily is culture-changing:

“I’ve lived around the New York City area my entire life. The primary reason for that is that’s where the work is. Many, many others also live within a one hour commute to Manhattan or another urban city for just that reason. One can usually get a decent job in the area, and if it doesn’t work out, can also find another one relatively easily….Won’t it be an amazing world when … people can make their decisions on where to live based on other, more important criteria? Things like where the schools are more appropriate, or where the quality of life is as calm or bustling as they desire, or where real estate costs are more manageable, or living near their family - those are the criteria that initially come to mind, but I’m sure there are others. It’s easy to see why this would be transformational to any employee.

It would also be transformational to the employers of the world. Think about how HR and recruiting would change – being able to hire the best and brightest regardless of how close they live to an office. And once they’re hired, being able to assign the best person to any task – promoting all those appropriate. This effects multiple levels of the workforce, not just those at the top. For example, call centers can now be virtual – without the need for a firm to buy heating or cooling or electricity or even a building for them.”

Traveling somewhere just to collaborate / share thoughts / work together in this day and age (if you're not working in the service industry) is ridiculous. Day-to-day communications can take place over team chat / instant messaging / enterprise social platforms, day-to-day long-form meetings can take place using video collaboration, and day-to-day personal interactions can take place over public social media. My colleagues – instead of being just those people I share an office with – are everyone in my firm all-over the globe. 

Yes, historically, the collaboration industry has been chock-full of bad solutions (and good solutions that work well in one application but poorly in others) and today is no different. However, as long as you take a user-needs-first approach to selecting tools – and embrace the reality that your organization will need a unique blend of tools to meet your unique needs – you’ll be able to easily remove tons of unnecessary travel by building a 100% effective collaboration ecosystem. (If you need help navigating your way around the confusing technology claims feel free to ping me – I’m always happy to help guide users around the various hypestorms.)

Traveling is an exhausting waste of time, but it can also be wonderful. Save your energies for that once in a lifetime trip with your family instead of wasting them on a train or an airplane to a meeting that could easily be joined from your home office.

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This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions. David has over three decades of experience providing problem solving leadership and innovation in media and unified communications technologies for various firms in the corporate, broadcasting and academic worlds including AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley, NYU, Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan Chase. He now works as The Director of UC Strategy and Research for Poly. He is also the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging Technology. David can be reached at [email protected] and his full bio and other blogs and articles can be seen at Danto.info.