4 happy lessons for road warriors in 2013

The Canadian carrier WestJet came up with an innovative holiday stunt: it gave select flyers exactly what they asked Santa for.

Joe Brancatelli

Business Travel Columnist

For all the bumps, bruises and indignities of business travel, I believe a life on the road is a success if you learned a lesson or two during the previous year.

For each of the previous six years that I have sat in Seat 2B — first for Portfolio.com and now here at The Business Journals — I’ve been able to write an end-of-the-year column offering up a few lessons learned. Thankfully, year seven is no different. I did learn stuff on the road in 2013.

None of it will fatten my frequent-travel program bankroll or make me a better person. But that may be asking too much. It’s enough to say that a lesson learned is its own reward.

Where ‘dwell time’ is not hell

My eyes roll whenever an airport executive starts talking about redesigning terminals and concourses to account for the extra “dwell time” that business fliers spend at his or her facility. I have zero interest in “dwelling” at any airport. I don’t want to shop. I don’t want to dine. And I sure as hell don’t want to spend an overnight. Like most of us, I want to get into and out of airports as fast as possible. There are a million places I’d prefer to “dwell” other than an airport.

But I learned this year that Singapore’s Changi Airport really does get the dwelling thing right. Instead of hustling through the place as I normally do, I carved out some time during a recent visit to tour the oft-honored, much-imitated airport. And no matter how blase you are about business travel, Changi will make you to smile.

Its newly renovated Terminal 1 has a rooftop pool. Terminal 2 has two gardens, one devoted to orchids, the other to sunflowers. Terminal 3 has a free movie theater, a koi pond and an astounding “butterfly garden” where you wander through tropical plants in the company of a rabble of butterflies. The terminals offer hundreds of retail shops, an apparently endless array of dining outlets and dozens of places to surf the Net, recharge your electronics, watch television or simply relax in a comfy chair. All three terminals are connected by walkways and a fast train. Each has a transit hotel where guestrooms can be rented in 6-hour blocks. And if you have a long layover between flights, the airport sponsors free bus tours of Singapore.

4 happy lessons for road warriors in 2013