Archives for posts with tag: Travel
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Travel Insurance for the Over 80s

October 11, 2019 //
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I was having lunch with my mother the other day. We were catching up on plans. ‘Apart from mine in Ireland, are you going anywhere else for a break?’ ‘I’m going to see Irene, remember?’ ‘No, I mean abroad.’ ‘No, I can’t get reasonable travel insurance now I’m over 80, it’s too expensive.’

OK, so I understand the underlying business model behind insurance. Anyone elderly is at a higher risk of needing expensive healthcare services compared with someone younger, it’s simple statistics. Throw in a medical condition and the risk increases even more sharply.

That said, does it not appear to you to suck big time that you can’t get to a certain age, when you have time, freedom and money to travel, without having to pay as much as your holiday in travel insurance?

That seems to me to be a real poor reward for working a full career and wanting to enjoy it.

‘So what did you do for travel insurance last year when we all went to Spain then?’ ‘I think I just took the risk and went without insurance. I didn’t feel like I had the choice’

That’s coming from an ordinarily very risk-averse octogenarian. Something’s not right, but I’m not sure what the answer is.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

My Eddie Bauer Bag

March 26, 2018 //
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My Eddie Bauer bag

My Eddie Bauer bag

What a pity is was that Eddie Bauer went bust. When was it, maybe 2009 or so?

I was in the US on business about a decade ago and bought a really warm down coat. While I was there I saw a laptop-holding travel bag that I’d been looking for for ages. It had an extra section that turned it from an overnight bag into something you could use for 3 or 4 nights, perfect for those short-ish business trips. For some reason, this kind of bag with the extra section and the extra 15 litres or so of capacity is really hard to find.

I spend a lot of time in the software industry and this bag fits right in. There must be 30 pockets in there, of all shapes, sizes and uses. The laptop section is very snug for devices of all sizes.

This bag accompanies me on almost every journey I make when I need to bring a laptop, and most even when I don’t. It always fits in the airplane overhead bins, and I never get asked to check it in, even when it’s full to bursting.

A treasure of a piece of travel luggage. I don’t know what I’ll do when I have to replace it.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing

Work and Public Transport

July 12, 2017 //
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Work and public transport don’t really play nice, do they? At least in rural Ireland, as I discovered to my cost the other day.

I needed to go and see the company that was doing the accounts for my limited company and for me and her ladyship as individuals. We only keep one car between us, and as MGL (aka My Good Lady) needed it to go further than me, into Galway city, I decided that I would use my legs, combined with public transport to go from my town, to the neighbouring town for the meeting, a mere 15km away.

Now I say town, but by English standards these would be 2 villages, with about 3 and 5 thousand people respectively in them. Although I don’t think there’s a bus service between the 2 places, on paper it was easy: walk to the train station, take a 10 minute train journey, and walk to the company’s office for a 2pm meeting.

I ambled down to my local station with the insouciance of a man on a day’s holiday, and collected my pre-booked ticket from the machine. So far so good. My train was an inter-city train, and my destination was the one stop before the train’s final destination.

The train was half an hour late. Apparently a train had problems earlier in the day and all subsequent services were backed up. This had the effect of depositing me at my destination station at 2pm, the time I needed to be at my meeting. This train station used to be located right in the town, but 5 or 10 years ago had been rebuilt in a new location which was – literally – in the middle of nowhere. It was laughable. It was almost as if the location had been picked precisely for its maximum inconvenience. No-one except those with oodles of time on their hands could do anything but drive to the station to use it.

A half hour’s walk later I was at the office for my meeting, 2:30 instead of 2pm. Fortunately it was a nice day, and double fortunately I was able to put my meeting back. What struck me, however, was how difficult it would be to work or run a business where I live without a car. Public transportation here is too unreliable and too skeleton, not does it make financial sense for the powers that be to lay on more of a service.

I don’t have the answer. I do have an answer, which is that work and public transport don’t mix well. Not until we move to a society where you can pick up a driverless car or a Coke Car locally, rather like a Coke Bike, and leave it at a handy communal destination. For now though, 90 minutes from door to door to go 15 km does not go…

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Categories Customers, General

Self-Employed Business Travel

June 16, 2017 //
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Business travel – in the sense of employed business travel – is fundamentally different to self-employed business travel. This is obvious in one way, since it’s the company’s money as opposed to your money, even if you have your own limited company.

In another way, though, in employed business travel you’re essentially getting reimbursed for everything you’re entitled to within the parameters of your employer’s expenses policy. You’re reimbursed for all expenses you reasonably incur.

When it’s your own money, and your own business, you’re more frugal, both with your customer’s budget and with your own budget, those expenditure items you don’t pass on to your customer.

As a self-employed worker you want to remain competitive, so charging significantly higher day rates to cover all your expenses is sometimes not a viable strategy. This manifests itself in the difference between, for example, charging an employer mileage for car use, as opposed to charging a customer the fuel and absorbing the quasi-hidden depreciation costs of putting miles on your own, self-employed car.

My self-employed business travel is not a life of taxis to the airport, airport executive lounges, ticket upgrades and so on. For me, a typical overseas journey can be a short walk to the train station, a train to the city, a short walk to the coach station, a coach to the airport, a flight with a budget airline, a lift to a cheaper – and therefore off-campus – car rental facility for getting to meetings, following by the reverse on the way home. Some of the expenses I absorb, some of them I pass on to my customers. This agreement keeps me competitive and more importantly fosters long-term relationships.

Everyone realises sooner or later that business travel is not the glamorous pastime we thought it was before we did it repeatedly. With self-employed business travel the sheen wears off even more quickly.

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Categories General

Industrial Inaction

October 14, 2016 //
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I was on the receiving end of a transport strike the other day. Or, industrial action, as it’s rather euphemistically called, as I attempted to get into the UK nation’s capital.

Industrial action. It should be called industrial inaction. It’s people who are providing a service – sometimes a single point of failure service – deciding not to provide that service, to do nothing.

Who suffers in this protracted battle of wills between the employer and the union? Other employees of supporting businesses who have to try and take the strain, but mainly the end customer, who funds – partly, I suppose – the service that’s supposed to be delivered but is being withheld.

A hundred thousand working people delayed, inconvenienced, frustrated and stressed. Wedged into late, irregular trains of a skeleton service like passengers on a Japanese commuter train, but with none of the punctuality. Hundreds of thousands of hours in lost productivity, lost contributions to national GDP, per day.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but it can’t lie in the antediluvian practices of outdated bodies, chaos, and meaningless apologies.

 

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Categories Customers, General

Slender Footprint

October 12, 2016 //
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A recurrent theme in this blog is personal productivity. Sometimes it also takes in with it environmental productivity, by which I mean a judicious use of the finite resources at our disposal to get around our place in the world.

This is something we can all do pretty well in the city, where the infrastructure is there to help us. It’s much harder to pull it off in those more sparsely populated areas.

A friend of mine that I work with from time to time has what I would call a slender footprint – in the sense of his carbon footprint rather than the mark his shoe leaves.

He lives in a city, in the nicest part in his city. Most of what he needs on the weekends is within a few minutes’ walk. When he’s working in the office, he has a 5-minute walk to the bus, a 20-minute bus ride into the centre, and a 5-minute walk to the office. A door-to-door commute of 30 minutes, where he can work for 20 of them, is just about perfect.

When he has to travel internationally for work, he can take the train or else a very affordable taxi to the airport. He has a car, but reckons he does no more than 1,000 miles a year in it, taken up by the occasional trip to the golf course or a trip to see the folks.

That’s what I call a slender footprint. Personal and environmental productivity at its finest.

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Categories General

Rough, Cough, Dough, Plough

October 10, 2016 //
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I wrote recently about how the most simple, innocuous, 2-letter words can cause palpitations in non-English native speakers.

I was reminded of this recently when I was complaining to my son – who is a fluent Irish speaker, schooled through the Gaelic tongue – about how hard it is to pronounce Irish words.

‘It’s much harder than English,’ I said.

To which my son replied, ‘Oh yeah, Dad, like Rough, Cough, Dough and Plough…’ He has a fair point; 4 words spelled with the same last 3 letters, all pronounced differently – uff, off, oh and ow.

Rough indeed. Regardless of our native language, we take its idiosyncracies and querks for granted.

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Categories General

When the time begins with a 4

October 7, 2016 //
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If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I’m all about productivity. Sometimes our productivity can be stretched over a long working day, and sometimes a shorter one.

If I’ve got a ton of work on or I have to travel a long distance to get to a meeting, I’m fine with getting up early, sometimes really early, and cranking out a very long day. I can’t do it every day, but I can when I need to.

Except when the time begins with a 4, as in 4-something am. 5am onwards is not a problem. There’s something barbaric about setting the alarm and having to get up when the time begins with a 4. It has a crushing effect on my productivity and staying power.

This doesn’t seem to apply when I’m heading off on holidays. Getting up at 2 or 3am for a a 6am flight to the sun, sea or slopes doesn’t seem so bad.

But when the getting up time begins wth a 4, and the effort is for work, then the mental tiredness and productivity plummet – rather than the physical tiredness necessarily – kicks in way earlier than leaving it until after 5.

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Categories General

Dublin Airport

September 28, 2016 //
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I’ve spoken before about how the world’s airports have a lot to learn from Irish airports, in terms of their free wifi, free drinking water and general welcoming ambience.

Well, you can add to that the speed with which they expedite people.

Recently, I landed on an arriving flight at 8:59am. We taxied to the gate, got off and I walked swiftly down the travelators through to passport control. I then went to baggage claim, used the bathroom and picked up my checked-in bag. I walked out of the terminal to the coach to take me home.

Nothing unusual in that. Except that it was 9:17am. 18 minutes had passed from runway to coach. This was during rush hour in the country’s biggest airport. It means that my bags were unloaded and moved from the plane to the baggage conveyor in no more than 10 minutes, probably 7 or 8.

In a world where we often moan about the time it take us to get from outside the terminal to the runway, and vice versa, my 18 minutes stands in stark contrast.

Phenomenal stuff.

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Categories Communication, Marketing

Single Point of Signal Failure

September 19, 2016 //
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As I’m sure you’re aware, a single point of failure is a bad thing. If the single point fails, the whole system fails. That’s why we try to build in contingencies.

I was reminded of this – and if you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that transportation and travel are recurrent themes – on a recent train journey into England’s capital. I was joining the train at Didcot, a 45-minute run into London and favoured as a daily commute by thousands of residents in the Didcot area.

The trains to London run every 15 minutes, and so they need to, to get the volume of people to London for work. A signal failure in the west of country cancelled one of these services and delayed another. This led to passengers being 5- and 6-deep on the platform edge. Because of the delay the train then had to drop anchor at another platform, which necessitated about a thousand people having to change platform.

Not for me. I stayed where I was, took a later train and was able to sit down and get some work done.

It seems amazing, though, that in 2016 a network and thousands of passengers can be compromised by a single point of failure, on this occasion a single point of signal failure.

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Categories Communication, Customers
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