The first question people ask me now is whether I miss the travel. I don’t. Not at all.
For years I was on the move three or four days a week, mostly pitching for new business. As an investment banking road warrior, I lived in the space between glamour and monotony. It became so routine that staying in the office felt wrong. If I was at my desk, I felt I should be out with clients. The road became the default and everything else felt like waiting.
Travel loses its appeal quickly when it becomes your job. Yes, there were beautiful cities and a handful of genuinely strange and wonderful moments, but after the 20th visit to the same financial district, even striking architecture fades into the background.
Every banker develops rituals to impose some control on an itinerant life. Some swore by particular hotels or restaurants. Others clung to smaller anchors. I remember a trip to Stockholm where we found a hotel gym that served excellent protein shakes. It became a small ceremony; something to anticipate in the otherwise mechanical cycle of arrival, meeting and departure.
Often you try to avoid staying overnight at all, taking the last flight home for a few hours in your own bed before starting again
If you stay at the same hotel often enough, the staff begin to recognise you and eventually management notices too. In the late 1990s I stayed at the same hotel in Lisbon so frequently that they gave me a tie as a thank you. It was one of the ugliest ties I have ever seen, but I kept it for years because I loved that hotel, its gardens and its pool. I would never have worn the tie, but it meant something to me all the same.
Most business travel is deeply unremarkable. The same chain cafés in different airports, the same fast food outlets, the same duty-free shops selling the same luxury goods. The airports of Zurich, Frankfurt, Helsinki — I knew them all. But corporate travel flattens geography into interchangeable transit hubs and conference rooms.
The idea of the travelling banker with tales of wild nights is mostly fiction, at least for a geezer like me. I was never arrested or thrown out of a club. You are usually too tired to go out and you need to be sharp the next morning. Often you try to avoid staying overnight at all, taking the last flight home for a few hours in your own bed before starting again.
One particular irritation stands out. I hated arriving at a hotel only to review yet another draft of a presentation. I would be exhausted and still forced to go through a pitch book for the umpteenth time, because there were always corrections or approvals required.
Some cities were undeniably more pleasant places to have dinner, especially the grand European capitals where good food and surroundings offered some consolation. Others were bleak and characterless; towns that seemed designed to drain what little energy remained after a long day. I will spare their names lest any of our readers hail from them, but they know who they are.
How many of those trips actually produced business? A single digit percentage. Most were a waste of time. The problem was that I never knew in advance which meetings would matter. I feared missing the one that might result in a major mandate.
I do not miss the road now. Any sense of importance that once came from constant travel faded long ago. What lingers is the question of whether it was worth the wear and tear. The physical toll is easy to underestimate when you are young and adrenaline masks fatigue. The noise of aircraft cabins alone must have done damage, and then there was the jet lag and the persistent exhaustion of shifting time zones. Add the low level stress of being away from home and routine and the costs accumulate.
Looking back, the lifestyle feels artificial; a manufactured urgency that once seemed essential but now does not. Constant motion justified itself. Being on the road signalled importance, client demand, and internal relevance. Strip away the performance and what remains is waiting in departure lounges, eating mediocre food at odd hours, and sleeping in indentikit hotel rooms.
The business class seat and the five star lobby suggest a champagne existence, but the reality is more prosaic. It is a plastic luxury, the appearance of privilege without real comfort or satisfaction. You are not lingering over fine wine (I usually abstained because alcohol made the fatigue worse). The bed is comfortable but not yours. The food is adequate but bland.
Business travel differs from leisure travel, even or especially when the latter is done at a lower budget. Leisure travel is about curiosity and immersion. Business travel is about efficiency. You take taxis to minimise friction. Time is scarce, fatigue is constant and in some places security matters. The aim is not to experience the place but to extract whatever business value is available and move on.
The smoothie bar in Stockholm, the café in Amsterdam with good bagels and the hideous tie from Lisbon were small compensations for a life spent in motion. Those years were formative. They taught me about clients, markets and endurance. I bonded with colleagues and had some good laughs along the way. Still, they also taught me that being nowhere in particular can, over time, feel like being nowhere at all.