Carrying On

The Best Things About Business Travel: Showing Them the World

August 30, 2011 at 11:44 am carryingonblog 1 comment

by Becky

I’ve been tweeting since last week about the 30 things I love most about business travel (#30things), and just today I got to #14: “We help people see the world.”

When she was head of Carlson Companies, Marilyn Carlson Nelson, one of my personal heroes, frequently referred to this as one of the more important roles business travel plays in the world, and it always inspired me. Just think: Because of our industry, professionals young and old are seeing Singapore and Beijing, Dubai and Mumbai, Minneapolis and San Francisco, Cairo and Rio de Janeiro.  With each of those trips, cultures are shared, minds are expanded, perspectives are broadened, stereotypes are challenged, and the world gets a little bit smaller.

After traveling to Denver for GBTA, I got to see a new part of the world myself, when, as promised in my last post, I hiked with friends to the top of our fifth 14,000-foot peak in the Colorado Rockies, Mount Quandary outside of Breckenridge. A wonderful added bonus was getting to see Levi Leipheimer, Christian Vande Velde, and Elia Viviana sprint to the finish line in stage 5 of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge in Breckinridge the next day. The world looked pretty amazing at 14,265 feet and at that finish line.

But then, the world has also looked amazing to me from a yurt in the Hong Kong harbor, from the banks of the Seine in Paris, from Queen Street in Toronto, from a pink-sand beach in Bermuda, from a balcony in New Orleans…. All places I have stood for the first time thanks to business travel.

Where has business travel taken you for the first time? Let’s keep the inspiration going!

Entry filed under: Becky's Ruminations, Business Travel. Tags: #30THINGS, Becky Waller, Business travel, GBTA.