We spend more time with colleagues and strangers of the opposite sex than we do our own spouse (no, not in that way, but at meetings, over dinners, seatmate times on a flight, co-commiserators over a delayed flight). You see the same people on the same flights, week after week, and know them better than you know your siblings.

Every business trip is like an episode of Survivor. Living on ghastly airport foods, hurdling over families with their little kids as they meander ever soooo slowly through the airport, figuring out how to cram a 22-inch bag into 6 inches of remaining overhead bin space and, the ultimate challenge, trying to get your rollaboard into the bathroom stall AND be able to close the door. It’s a rough world out there!

And our friends and family think we have such a glamorous life!

So if a network were to walk up to you, as you have boarding pass in hand anxiously awaiting the go-ahead to board your flight, and offer you your very own reality show, what name will be up in lights for you?

Me? “Your Hotel or Mine?”

And yours?

Great movie but it was far from reality. Don’t get me wrong, I love traveling, but it is hardly easy. What are the downsides to traveling every week?  Let me count the ways …

It begins with packing, typically an hour in total (20 minutes packing my luggage, 40 minutes packing my laptop tote). While I am pretty good about including everything after so many years of experience, sometimes I shake my head in disbelief at all of the items I want to take with me that just don’t make sense. Am I really going to work on knitting a scarf while in-flight or read a dozen magazines?

The actual travel time to the airport, and for some the parking of the car, adds to the hassle.

Then there is the occasional check-in at the ticket counter – mandatory if you have checked bags. On a good day, the wait is relatively short. In Orlando, due to many tourists departing on Monday mornings the waits are generally long.

Early flights are the best because the plane is most likely on time. The downside here is having to get up quite early. Depending on the flight time, I am awake as early as 3 am to achieve this benefit. It always means a very short night of sleep of only three to four hours.

Even the best of flights require some long TSA lines. While a few airports have an “Expert” traveler line, TSA routinely ignores it. If any Orlando TSA workers read this, please enforce this rule! All in all, it can take 20-40 minutes to get through security, and you are rewarded with an additional wait for the shuttle to the terminal plus a 5-15 minute walk to the gate.

Flight delays and canceled flights are no picnic. I always check the weather for any connecting cities, but planes delayed elsewhere can impact flights even where the weather is fine.  At its worst, it means sleeping overnight in an airport. I have been in this situation too many times!

Travel time is always very long. It includes getting to the airport, getting from the front door to the gate, flying to a destination, walking to the rental car agency, renting a car, driving to a hotel, parking, checking in, getting to your room, and finally unpacking.

And after all is said and done, the road home requires re-packing, checking out of a hotel, driving to the airport, returning a rental car, and going through that long walk – including the dreaded TSA lines – all over again.  Add to this the jet lag, missed events and family moments back home and it begins to look ugly. Eventually you get to your home airport, walk to the baggage claim to wait again, complete the drive back home and get ready for unpacking the mountain of mail which always awaits. A few days at home and it starts all over again.

There are many upsides to business travel, but after 25 years I accept the downsides. In the real world, I feel more like Groundhog Day than Up in the Air. When my mind wanders through movieland, just once it would be nice to get to a destination by clicking my heels together or saying, “Beam me up, Scottie!”

On Saturday, I saw the movie, Up in the Air. Living away from home a couple hundred days a year myself, I wondered how Hollywood would glamorize jetting off from place to place. Wonder no more.

George Clooney was excellent, as always. It was easy to imagine him as a hurried corporate downsizer living on the road 322 days a year. Yes, his character was a bit cold and steely but looking into his beautiful eyes, he can fire me any day.

But was the movie real? Clooney went through the same TSA lines as everyone else. One very real point also was a great tip: Business travelers never get in a line behind, as he says, families or older people. The fastest lines generally are those dedicated to frequent travelers who know all the rules.

The scene where the new associate comes into the airport lugging a large suitcase was great. Clooney is right, nearly all business travelers live out of a carry-on, avoiding checked bags whenever possible.

Much of the movie was shot in secondary airports like St. Louis, Omaha, and Tulsa. Missing were the monster airports with multiple terminals and massive TSA lines like Atlanta, New York, and Los Angeles. I kind of envied him there.

The part of the movie where he talks about his accumulated miles is actually pretty real. Most of the frequent travelers I know are at least aware of their total awards and points, if not obsessed to where they check them each day. By the way, I use Mileport as my dashboard of award balances.

While American Airlines is not my primary carrier, I did have a couple observations. First, there were empty seats in first
class. I don’t see that on Continental or Delta. Second, there were quite a few puddle jumper flights but even those had large first class sections. Is this the way it works on American Eagle?

As a HiltonHonors high status member, he certainly would have had room upgrades all the time. In other words, his hotel rooms should have been pretty nice suites. Instead, they looked to be, well, very ordinary rooms.

The scene where Clooney pulls out his many loyalty cards was a little overkill but funny. The only time a card is necessary is for entrance to the airport lounges. The others – airlines, hotels, car rentals, etc – already have the numbers in their systems so the scene at Hertz where the young guy asks Clooney for his member number never would have happened.

The part about the 10 million miles with AA was confusing. The movie suggested he was seeking to be credited with that many base air miles. That is quite different than an equal amount of frequent flier points which can be achieved many ways other than flying.

At about 350,000 miles flown each year, it would take him nearly 30 years to rack up 10 million air miles. Sorry, Clooney doesn’t look nearly old enough to have been doing that kind of flying, but I suppose it’s possible.

And then there was his sparse home. Well, he calls it home for about 40 nights a year. As a bachelor always on the run, that might be quite an accurate portrayal. Fortunately I can’t relate to that part.

All in all, a bittersweet movie but nice to sit back and see much of what I probably look like during the hustle and bustle each week. Well, without the extracurricular romance, anyway.

Since I have been watching CNN for so many years, I was excited to take the tour of the CNN Headquarters in Atlanta today.  

   
While I did not run into the real Larry King or Wolf Blitzer (just their cardboard look-alikes), it was great to see the studios where so many of their shows are broadcast from.  And when CNN comes calling and has me, the Smart Woman Traveler, on their show, I am already familiar with their studios!

What was very interesting during the CNN tour was seeing several producers at their desks busy with Twitter and Facebook. Not once in our walk-through did we see any of them pick up their telephones. The system for discovering and reporting on the news has certainly changed with the influx of social media. 

You can follow @CNN and @CNNBrk for breaking news on Twitter and the CNN Fan Page on Facebook.

And CNN, contact me at @smartwomentrav to schedule road warrior stories from the female perspective!

Since we are about half-way through another mileage-earning 12 months, are you starting to monitor what your frequent flier mile accumulation has been for the year?  No frequent flier wants to get to the end of the year and realize that they were just a few miles short of attaining status on an airline.  That could mean you’ll be walking to the back of the bus (a.k.a. Coach) in the next year on a consistent basis.  By the way, I use Mileport.com to monitor the balances in my frequent flyer and loyalty accounts with one easy-to-update screen.

What crazy flights have you taken in order to reach a mileage milestone level for status?  I’ve read of travelers who fly to another continent and back in the same day just to pick up miles that they need. There are also travelers who say they do their best work in-flight, so they fly many long flights to get their work done while accumulating air miles.  I tend to agree here on getting quality work done in-flight, but I haven’t yet bought an airline ticket just for the sake of working in my office chair in the sky. I have, however, been known to do a bit of Christmas shopping in order to cross the finish line on reaching a particular status with an airline.  A few years back, I was a couple thousand miles short in the last few weeks of December and wasn’t going to be traveling for business over the holidays. So one Friday morning, I woke up early at home, grabbed a big empty duffle bag, drove to the airport and flew from Orlando to Minneapolis.  Any good shopper in the U.S. knows that the Mall of America, our largest indoor mall, is in Minneapolis.  And lucky for me, it met the number of miles I needed to reach status and I got all of my Christmas shopping done in one jammed-packed day before flying home that evening with a very full duffel bag.  (Important note: There is a train to the Mall right from the airport, so there is no need to go outside in the cold weather – a great benefit for a Floridian and an easy way to get a bit of shopping done with a long layover.)

So while we await the release of George Clooney’s next movie “Up in the Air”, let us know what crazy things you have done (or would do) to reach your frequent flier goals.  And if the movie just happens to come out in December as the year finishes up and we’re a bit short a few miles, we may just need to meet in some faraway city in order reach our status.  That sounds like fun! 

Hope to see you Up in the Air!