Travel time and working time: What business travellers do when they travel,and why

Introduction

In today’s working life, much time is spent travelling. Not only do most workers travel to and from their ordinary workplace, but workers also, to an increasing extent, travel as part of their job. In particular, growing numbers of white-collar workers travel in order to participate in internal and external meetings, visit customers, suppliers or other partners, attend conferences and trade fairs, and so forth (Doyle and Nathan, 2001; Swarbrooke and Horner, 2001). It is this kind of travel – business travel – that will be investigated here. Social scientists have begun to explore why business travellers need to travel, how both companies and individual workers differ in their travel activity, and how travellers and their employers perceive the positive and negative sides of frequent travel (Aguiléra, 2008; Ivancevich et al., 2003). This article explores a related question – how business travellers use their travel time and, in particular, in what ways, for what reasons and under what circumstances travel time becomes working time.

The broader theoretical setting of the study includes both research about travel and transport and research about the temporal and spatial organization of work. In transportation research, travel is commonly understood as a ‘derived demand’ – not an end in itself but necessitated by a desire or a need to pursue activities at the destination. This conception holds a great deal of truth in the case of business travel. For example, Aguiléra (2008) convincingly shows how the development of multi-unit companies, the internationalization of markets, and organizational trends such as work in project teams and inter-firm cooperation create a need for long-distance communication and travel in many companies (see also Beaverstock et al., 2010).

Yet the conception of travel as a derived demand has its limitations. It tends to regard travel as only a means to reach the destination, and travel time as a ‘disutility’ – as empty, unproductive time (Lyons et al., 2007: 108). In contrast, several scholars argue that travel may sometimes be an end in itself and that travellers often perceive their travel time as enjoyable and useful (Lyons and Urry, 2005; Mokhtarian and Salomon, 2001). In the case of business travel, travel time may in fact be ‘productive’ from both the traveller’s and the employer’s perspective. This is most obvious when travellers spend their travel time working (Holley et al., 2008).

Business travel and the use of travel time also involve questions about work organization. One important theoretical theme in this area concerns flexibility, deregulation and individualization of work. For many white-collar jobs in particular, work has become increasingly flexible, not only in terms of employment conditions and work tasks but also with regard to the organization of work in time and space (Allvin, 2008; Allvin and Aronsson, 2003). Furåker suggests that business travel in order to perform work at different destinations, together with practices such as telecommuting, homeworking and various forms of mobile work, implies a ‘spatial flexibility’ of work. Moreover, spatial flexibility often also leads to flexibility with regard to working time – employees increasingly perform work outside their ordinary workplace and regardless of ordinary working hours (Furåker, 2005: 200).

These developments are often interpreted as reflections of a general tendency towards deregulation and individualization of work: ‘the regulations of work are becoming more and more flexible, in the sense that the expectations placed on the worker to define, structure and discipline her own performance are increasing’ (Allvin and Aronsson, 2003: 107, italics in original). This may be to the workers’ advantage, in so far as it promotes work autonomy. But it can also be stressful, as it tends to blur the distinction between work and private life, and often means increasing demands to be available for work. Metaphorically, work becomes ‘boundaryless’ (Allvin, 2008; Bergman and Gustafson, 2008). Some studies also point out that it is difficult to enforce rules and regulations about, for example, working time and work environment among employees who can (and do) work anywhere and anytime (Allvin and Aronsson, 2003; Wheatley et al., 2008).

The present article uses qualitative interviews and policy documents to go deeper into some of these discussions. To begin with, it investigates what business travellers do when they travel. Do they work and, in that case, how do they work, why do they work and what are their working conditions on the road? It then broadens the perspective on business travel time and working time in two important ways. First, it examines what formal demands and informal expectations employers have about using travel time as working time. Are business travellers expected, or obliged, to work when they travel, or is it their own choice whether or not to do so? Second, it explores both travellers’ and employers’ overall strategies with regard to business travel. What priorities are most important in these strategies, and to what extent do they consider the (possible) use of travel time as working time?

The next section reviews existing research on business travel time and its possible use for work-related activities, and some implications of this research. Then follows a description of data and methods. Subsequent sections investigate how frequent business travellers use their travel time, what expectations employers have with regard to work during travel time, and what general travel strategies frequent business travellers and their employers have. The article ends with a concluding discussion.

Business travel time and work

A growing body of research today explores how unexpected settings such as railway compartments, cars and airports may be turned into workplaces and how innovative forms of mobile work develop, often closely connected to new information and communication technologies (Hislop, 2008). On the one hand, business travellers and commuters who spend much time travelling often look for ways to make some productive use of their travel time (Brown and O’Hara, 2003; Holley et al., 2008; Holm and Kendall, 2008). On the other hand, trains and airplanes as well as railway stations, airports, hotels, cafés and other places where travellers stay (or pass by) are increasingly designed and equipped for being used as workplaces, mainly for computerized office work (Breure and van Meel, 2003; Lyons and Urry, 2005).

Findings reported by Holley et al. (2008) from the UK and by Hjorthol and Gripsrud (2008) from Norway suggest that between 50 and 60 percent of business travellers spend some of their travel time working or studying. However, the possibility to use travel time as working time may differ between different means of transport. For example, Lyons and Urry (2005) suggest that train journeys allow more productive use of travel time than other forms of travel, because of low levels of stress and lack of interruptions (see also Kogg, 2000: 21). To what extent business travellers work while travelling depends, of course, also on practical circumstances such as crowdedness, available space for setting up a laptop and spreading one’s papers, possibilities to use technical devices, disturbing noise, insufficient lighting, and so forth (Holm and Kendall, 2008; Watts and Lyons, 2007).

Most travellers today have their mobile phones with them, and many business travellers use these for work-related calls during their journeys (Thulin and Vilhelmson, 2008). Laptops, PDAs, BlackBerries and other electronic devices are also becoming increasingly common. For example, Hjorthol and Gripsrud (2008) report that 25 percent of the business travellers and commuters in a study, when asked about their present train journey, said that they had used a portable computer. In spite of this, several studies emphasize that mobile work is in fact often paper-based because technological equipment is difficult to use when travelling (Brown and O’Hara, 2003).

When travelling by car, driving obviously limits the opportunities for other activities, making phone calls (in countries where this is permitted) being the main exception. Yet unlike trains, buses and airplanes, the car is a ‘private’ means of transport (Lyons and Urry, 2005). It offers not only privacy for telephone communication but also a private space which some frequent travellers turn into more or less personalized ‘mobile offices’ (Bergström, 2006; Laurier and Philo, 1998).

Although business travellers may spend some of their travel time working, they generally also do other things. Sleeping, resting, reading and window gazing are common activities (Hjorthol and Gripsrud, 2008; Lyons et al., 2007). This may seem a highly unproductive use of time, yet Holley et al. (2008) argue that such ‘time out’ or ‘anti-activity’ may be important for doing a good job later on, and thus be beneficial not only to the employee, but also to the employer (see also Jain and Lyons, 2008). The boundary between working time and personal time may thus get blurred when travelling, and Lyons et al. (2008) claim that the ‘ownership’ of business travel time (whether it belongs to the traveller or to the employer) becomes ambiguous because of this mixing of work-related and other activities.

Research about travellers’ use of travel time has given rise to two related arguments that are of interest here (Thulin and Vilhelmson, 2008). First, as information and communication technologies make travel time more useful and productive, people may accept longer travel times. Second, if travellers pay more attention to their use of travel time, their choice of travel mode (e.g. car, train or air travel) may in the future depend less on travel time and more on the opportunities that different travel modes offer for making good use of the travel time (Jain and Lyons, 2008; Kaufmann, 2002). In addition, employers may want their employees to make productive use of their travel time, and therefore encourage them to choose travel modes that permit or facilitate mobile work. However, there is as yet little empirical support for these different arguments. Existing studies have mainly investigated what travellers do when they travel and how they experience their travel time, but not what consequences these factors have for their choice of travel mode. A survey by Lassen (2005) indicates that time savings in fact remain an important priority for many business travellers. Even less is known about practices and priorities among employers.

The notion of meaningful travel time has also been used to question current methods for estimating the economic benefits of new transport infrastructures. Such methods assume that travel time is unproductive time and consequently treat travel time savings – made possible by, for example, a new motorway or a new high-speed railway – as economic gains. The estimated value of travel time savings is highest in the case of business travel, as business travellers’ time is assumed to be compensated for by the employer, whereas time savings during leisure travel are given a much lower value. Lyons and his colleagues, in a series of papers, have criticized the assumptions underlying these transport appraisals. Their basic argument is that, as business travellers often make some productive use of their travel time, current transport appraisals systematically exaggerate the economic utility of new transport infrastructures (Holley et al., 2008; Lyons and Urry, 2005).

Research on travel, stress and work−life balance provides an additional perspective on the use of business travel time as working time. Several studies show that frequent business travel may be stressful to the travellers for a variety of reasons, including a perceived ‘pressure to perform their jobs on the road’ (DeFrank et al., 2000: 63; see also Doyle and Nathan, 2001; Ivancevich et al., 2003). It has also been shown that frequent business travellers often have demanding working conditions in other respects as well, and that the boundary between their working time and their leisure or family time is often unclear (Bergman and Gustafson, 2008). On the one hand, then, using business travel time as working time may be perceived as making productive use of one’s travel time. On the other hand, improved possibilities to work on the road may contribute to the excessive busyness (Darrah et al., 2007), the ‘boundaryless’ working conditions (Allvin, 2008) and the competing demands for availability in time and space (Bergman and Gustafson, 2008) that make it increasingly difficult for many workers today to obtain a sustainable work−life balance. However, little is known about the travellers’ own strategies in this regard and, again, even less is known about the strategies of their employers.

Data and method

The study presented here is based on qualitative analysis of three kinds of data. First, semi-structured interviews were made with 12 travel managers in Sweden. Travel managers typically work in large or medium-sized organizations, and their work tasks include developing and implementing travel policies, negotiating agreements with travel agencies and suppliers (airlines, hotel chains etc.), developing booking and payment routines, and collecting and analysing travel statistics (Gustafson, 2012; Lubbe, 2003). For the present study, interviewees were recruited among the members of the Swedish Business Travel Association − a professional organization for travel managers. The selection aimed at variation, as different kinds of employers may organize travel differently and their employees may travel for different reasons. Thus, four of the travel managers were working at public authorities and eight at private companies in different sectors, including services, trade and manufacturing. Four of them were men and eight women, and they were between 34 and 63 years of age. During the interviews, the travel managers were asked how business travel was managed in their organizations and also what expectations the employers had regarding the use of travel time.

Second, each travel manager was asked to recruit two or a few frequent business travellers in the organization for separate interviews. Some of them found this difficult, as such individuals are often very busy, but in the end semi-structured interviews were made with 22 employees, representing 11 of the 12 organizations, and whom the travel managers identified as frequent business travellers. This group included 12 men and 10 women, most of them managers or professionals, with ages ranging from 28 to 58 years. They were asked about their experiences of business travel, their travel strategies, and what consequences their travelling had for their work situation and for their private life. The duration of the interviews, both with travellers and travel managers, was generally between 1 and 2 hours.

Third, 10 of the 12 organizations also made their travel policies (or similar documents) available to the study. These documents contained more or less elaborate rules, guidelines and recommendations about travel. They were generally produced by the travel managers and approved by the managing director or director-general, and thus represent – together with the travel manager interviews – the employers’ perspective on business travel.

The interviews were transcribed and entered, together with the policy documents, into a computer program for qualitative analysis (NVivo) and subsequently coded and analysed thematically. For the present article, themes related to travel time and travel strategies were extracted and examined more closely.

The main focus in the analysis was on common patterns and variation in the entire body of empirical data. Initial comparisons were also made between male and female travellers, as previous research has shown that men travel far more than women at work and that frequent business travel may have different implications for male and female travellers (Bergström Casinowsky, forthcoming; Gustafson, 2006). However, no systematic gender differences appeared in the use of, or attitudes to, travel time, so this line of analysis was not pursued further.

A question that deserves some consideration is whether travel managers, when asked to recruit travellers for interviews, selected persons who they thought would provide responses that were favourable to the employer, and whether that may have affected the results of the study. During the interviews, some travellers did in fact criticize their employers in various respects, while others did not, and it is difficult to judge to what extent the recruitment procedure affected that. Yet the main findings regarding travel time have support across organizations, and in important respects also across types of data (travel manager interviews, traveller interviews and travel policies). This speaks in favour of the study’s validity.

What business travellers do when they travel

This section uses the interviews with frequent travellers to investigate what business travellers do when they travel. It examines to what extent they use travel time as working time, how and why they work, and what working conditions they have when travelling.

What employers expect from business travellers

Understanding the great variation in business travellers’ use of travel time requires a broader perspective on their work situation and on the organizational regulation of travel. This section therefore examines what employers expect from their business travellers. It uses travel manager interviews, travel policies and to some extent also interviews with frequent travellers to investigate what formal demands and informal expectations employers have with regard to work during travel time.

When asked about travel time and work, travel managers in both private companies and public authorities mostly gave similar answers. On the one hand, nobody knew of any formal obligations to work when travelling. On the other hand, they generally believed that many travellers spent at least part of their travel time working, as travellers usually have a high workload and therefore try to make use of any time available for work. The expectations from the employers were not, the travel managers said, about working on the plane or in the train compartment, but about getting one’s work done in a satisfactory way. Thus, if travellers spent their travel time working it was regarded as their own choice, or as a reflection of their overall work situation, but not as any explicit policy on the part of the employer:

Interviewer: Are people expected to work when they sit on the train, for example?

Travel manager: No, I mean, absolutely not. There is nothing of that kind in any policy or in any demands from anybody. I mean it’s transport time really. But with the workload that people have today, they see it as an excellent opportunity to have some three hours for going through their emails, for example. So I think that for their own good, for their own survival, they are quite happy to do that, to avoid having too much to do the next day.

Similarly, none of the 10 travel policy documents that were collected in the study contained any formal demands or obligations to work on the road. In most policies there were no directions whatsoever about travellers’ use of travel time. There were, however, passages in several policies indicating that travellers might indeed be working. In some cases, train travel in first class was allowed with the explicit motive that it offered better working conditions. A few travel policies also provided advice about, for example, using a privacy filter on one’s laptop and not discussing business-related matters in the presence of strangers. In addition, some travel managers pointed out that employers provided the technical equipment that their employees might need for mobile work, such as mobile phones and laptops with wireless internet connection.

The travellers, for their part, reported no explicit demands to work when travelling. They generally felt that they could decide for themselves what to do during their journeys, and those who mainly used their travel time to relax had no guilty conscience about that. However, those who often spent their journeys working claimed that they needed to do so in order to meet the overall expectations on their work performance.

Importantly, frequent business travellers often belong to a category of employees who are not paid for overtime work and who thus have no strictly specified working hours. They are usually compensated for this by an extra week’s paid holiday and a more generous salary. Such employment agreements, together with the fact that most travellers in the study reported long or very long working hours, probably reinforce the conception, among both travellers and employers, that it is the travellers’ own choice whether or not to work when travelling.

Several travellers also reported that they could take a morning, an afternoon or an occasional day off to compensate for long travel times. In a few organizations there were formalized agreements about this, but it was more common that travellers did this ‘on [their] own responsibility’, or felt that they had a ‘silent agreement’ with their managers about such compensatory leave.

A few travellers in the study were in fact entitled to economic travel time compensation. This took the form of an hourly payment when travel time exceeded normal working hours. Contrary to overtime pay, such compensation was considerably lower than the normal salary. These travellers therefore seemed to perceive it as compensation for travelling during non-working hours, and not as compensation for working.

The findings presented here indicate that employers generally have no formal rules about work during travel time. Informal expectations to work on the road may exist, to varying degrees in different organizations and for different employees. In any case, frequent business travellers often have a high degree of autonomy with regard to when and where they work, and neither employers nor most travellers regarded more formal regulation of working time and travel time as an important issue. Many travellers had in fact surprisingly little or diffuse knowledge about formal rules and agreements regarding working hours and travel time.

Travel strategies among travellers and employers

This section puts the question about travel time and working time in an even broader context, by examining what general strategies frequent travellers and employers have with regard to business travel and whether these strategies involve considerations about work during travel time. When analysing the interviews and travel policies with these questions in mind, a relatively consistent pattern appears across the organizations.

To begin with, the travellers’ most important strategies generally concerned time, and in particular efforts to reduce travel time. Many had expert knowledge about departure and arrival times of different airline or train connections, the time it took to move from their home or workplace to the airport or railway station, what waiting times one could expect at different airports and terminals, and so forth – and used this knowledge to minimize travel and waiting times. There was also a strong tendency among the travellers (confirmed by several travel managers) to avoid overnight stays, but rather start their journeys early in the morning or return home late at night. Temporal strategies also included reducing the number of journeys by using telephone or video conferences instead of physical meetings. In addition, many travellers tried to combine several meetings on the same journey in order to have a full working day on the destination and to make fewer journeys.

The main reasons for these temporal strategies concerned family life, social obligations and leisure activities at home. In particular, travellers with young children often tried hard to minimize the time they spent away from their families. But travellers’ efforts to reduce travel time sometimes also had to do with the quality of their working time. Some ‘mobile workers’, as described above, certainly appreciated the working conditions in trains and airplanes, but many travellers felt that they worked less efficiently on the road than at the office. Their strategies to make fewer journeys, to travel fewer hours and to have a full working day at the destination thus also involved an effort to spend as much of their working time as possible at a regular workplace.

If time was the first priority for most frequent travellers, the second priority was money, and to keep travel costs within reasonable limits. Most travellers in the study primarily looked for flights or train connections that provided the best timing for the meetings or events they were going to, even if these connections did not offer the lowest price. If several suitable flights were available, though, ticket price was often an important factor, and if their preferred connection was perceived as unreasonably expensive they would usually accept a cheaper ticket at less than optimal hours. The limits for how ‘bad’ travel schedules travellers would accept were subject to implicit or explicit negotiations and agreements between individual travellers, their managers, and sometimes the organization’s travel manager. There were, however, also individual travellers who took pride in finding low-priced tickets, even if this meant uncomfortable journeys at odd hours.

Considerations about work during travel time were of less importance in these strategies. Several travellers appreciated the possibilities to work on the train, and a few of them might consider this in their choice of travel mode. As one traveller put it, ‘if it’s not too much extra time, then I choose the train’. However, the amount of ‘extra’ time that travellers were willing to spend on the road was in most cases limited. Several travellers in fact chose to travel by air, even on domestic journeys where the train might have been an alternative, and even though they disliked the working conditions when flying:

Traveller: You have to queue, to pass the security control, and all this prevents you from starting up your computer and having some meaningful working time. You get so short sequences and so many disruptions. It’s not like sitting on the train, travelling with the X2000 [a high-speed train] for 2 hours and 45 minutes, because there you can sit down and work. You can concentrate and read a book or you can have some rest or … do a lot of things, and have a meaningful working period. But you don’t get that when you’re flying.

Interviewer: But you keep flying anyway?

Traveller: Yes.

Interviewer: And why is that?

Traveller: Because it’s … I think it’s the most efficient way to move, really.

As for the employers in the study, work during travel time was usually no explicit priority in their strategies and travel policies, the main exception being the permission, in some organizations, to travel first class on the train in order to have a better work environment. Instead, the central objective with regard to travel was to control and reduce travel costs. Policies and booking procedures sometimes prescribed the lowest available ticket price, sometimes had rules about ‘lowest logical airfare’ or a reasonable compromise between cost, comfort and time. Most travel policies also made recommendations about reducing travel and travelling by train rather than by air or by car, in order to reduce CO₂ emissions. Yet most travellers felt that they had, in reality, considerable freedom to choose the travel mode and the travel time that suited them best. The employers, they felt, largely accepted their temporal strategies as long as travel costs stayed within the limits of their overall travel budget and as long as they did not conspicuously violate travel policy.

Concluding discussion

This article contributes to the existing literature on business travel and the use of travel time in several ways. It investigates in some detail what business travellers actually do when they travel, and in particular whether, how and why they work. Moreover, it examines the employers’ policies and expectations about the use of travel time and, in addition, the more general travel strategies pursued by travellers and employers. Arguably, this approach gives a broader understanding of business travel time and working time than previous research.

The findings clearly support the point made by Lyons et al. (2008) that the ownership of travel time is ambiguous. Employers expected their employees to carry out their work tasks, but made no formal demands about work during travel time. The travellers therefore felt that it was largely their own choice whether or not to use travel time as working time, and even though many travellers did some work on the road, there were considerable individual differences in the use of travel time. As for these individual differences, the analysis shows at least four different attitudes to travel time and working time.

First, travel time may be regarded as just any other working time. This attitude is most clearly pronounced among those frequent travellers who could be described as mobile workers, who carry their work with them in their laptops and work wherever they are. Second, travel time during long-distance journeys may appear as a special kind of working time – an opportunity to perform work tasks that demand undisturbed and uninterrupted time and are therefore difficult to do at one’s regular workplace. Third, travel time may be perceived as tiring, boring and less useful time. Some travellers with this attitude do not work at all when travelling. Others do some work, in order to manage a high overall workload, but feel that they are not very efficient during travel time. Fourth, travel time may give valuable ‘time out’ from work – time that travellers use for relaxation and restoration (see Holley et al., 2008; Jain and Lyons, 2008). What attitude, or what combination of attitudes, people have to their travel time may depend on a range of practical circumstances as outlined above – distance and temporal duration, time of day, travel mode, working conditions on the journey and so forth. In addition, the absence of formal regulation of travel time by the employers gives individual travellers considerable freedom to define and manage their travel time in relation to their total work and life situation.

Moreover, even though many frequent travellers do work on the road, and generally appreciate having good working conditions while travelling, their overall travel strategies usually aim at minimizing travel time. There are three main reasons for this. First, frequent travellers generally feel that their travel time encroaches on time devoted to family, friends and leisure activities. Second, many (although not all) travellers consider working time on the road as less efficient than working time at the office, because of difficult working conditions, frequent interruptions and waiting times. Third, travel itself may be stressful, tiring and physically demanding (see Ivancevich et al., 2003). Travel managers, for their part, generally encourage travellers to restrict their overall travel activity and to reduce travel costs. They may question unnecessarily expensive air journeys and other obvious deviations from the organization’s travel policy, but the present study nevertheless indicates that employers mostly accept travellers’ strategies for minimizing their travel time. This acceptance is probably due to an understanding that frequent business travel may indeed be stressful to the travellers, who are, in addition, often managers and professionals with a high status, and who are usually considered as important and valuable persons in their organizations.

Taken together, these findings question some of the arguments advanced in previous research on business travel time (Jain and Lyons, 2008; Kaufmann, 2002). Claims that opportunities for working on the road would make travellers accept longer travelling times in general, or that they would prefer more time-consuming travel modes if these provided better working conditions, receive only limited support. For the frequent travellers examined here – in particular those who had families – time savings remained crucial and often outweighed considerations about productive travel time.

This also suggests that claims about productive travel time in discussions about appraisals of the economic utility of new transport infrastructures may need some reservations. Many business travellers do indeed perform a certain amount of ‘productive’ work when travelling (work that creates value for their employers), and the claim that current appraisals therefore exaggerate the value of travel time savings seems justified (Holley et al., 2008; Lyons and Urry, 2005). Yet the travel strategies explored here, and the predominant role of travel time savings in these strategies, suggest that transport appraisals should not only consider the amount of travel time that is being used as working time. They would also need to consider the perceived quality of this working time, the travellers’ attempts to limit their overall travel time in order to achieve a sustainable work−life balance, and the competition regarding travel time and time savings that exists between different travel modes, especially on domestic journeys.

A limitation of this study, and of the arguments pursued above, is of course that the kind of frequent business travellers examined here are a relatively small group of people. They differ from other workers not only in their high travel activity, but also with regard to their positions and work tasks (mainly managers and professionals, doing administrative and ‘intellectual’ work with a high degree of autonomy). Their experiences of travel and their priorities with regard to travel time and working time should not be generalized uncritically to other groups on the labour market.

However, as suggested by the initial theoretical discussion, the questions raised here about the ownership and use of travel time have wider implications. In an increasingly mobile society, both frequent business travellers and many other workers travel – to, from, or as part of, their job. At the same time, technological facilities for working on the road are developing rapidly. Mobile work may contribute to both efficiency and work autonomy, but it may also give rise to work−family conflict and excessive busyness because of the opportunities, and subsequent expectations, to work anywhere and anytime (Allvin, 2008; Darrah et al., 2007). The relationship between travel time and working time therefore requires considerations and choices on the part of the travellers and – implicitly or explicitly – also on the part of their employers.