To paraphrase Annie Get Your Gun, there’s no incompetent business traveler like an incompetent professional business traveler. Getting people from A to B might be the essence of our job, but when we head off on a journey ourselves it turns out we are far more likely to end up instead at C, or not at all, or at least not with our dignity intact. Here then is a festive collection of spectacular business trip mess-ups kindly volunteered by luminaries from the corporate travel world. Our huge thanks to each of them for being such fantastic sports by sharing their most embarrassing moments with us. You will not believe how many ways there are to get every step of a journey so spectacularly wrong…It’s behind you!Arriving in Aberdeen one very cold night, I spent 45 long minutes queuing for a taxi in minus temperatures. When it finally arrived, I hopped in and gave the driver my hotel name, to which he replied, “Are you having a laugh?” I was confused until I followed where his finger was pointing. My hotel. Which I had spent three-quarters of an hour standing next to in the freezing cold.Alice Linley-Munro, travel manager, Oil Spill Response
Kent stop me nowWhen I joined Eurostar many years ago, as an employee I was entitled to catch our trains at Waterloo and alight at Ashford International station (not something the public can do as Eurostar isn’t licensed to carry domestic passengers). In my first week with the company I traveled down late one afternoon to meet my new customer contact center team. I was perplexed as the train showed no sign of slowing down as we approached Ashford and was even more so as we entered the tunnel… first stop Brussels! When we emerged in France, I phoned my wife to explain I might not be home that night. Far from getting any sympathy, she found my easy mistake sufficiently funny to tell my boss, Ian Brooks, when he happened to call my home. Ian, in turn, felt it necessary to re-tell the tale on his next call that evening, which just happened to be with Richard Branson. All this before I had even arrived at Brussels. Adrian Watts, director, Pewley PartnersGrin and bare itNot my proudest business trip moment was getting off a British Airways flight at London Heathrow, all dolled and dressed up (this was back in the early Nineties) in very high heels. Everyone was looking at me and smiling, so I flung back my hair and straightened my back as I sashayed down the aisle. But as I continued walking it felt like something was not right in my ankle area. Any woman who remembers “stay up” stockings will know how I felt as I realized both of them had lost their grip and were now wrapped around my shoes.Alexandra Novak, global head of travel sourcing, Ericsson
