Travel trials.

• Author: Couch, Robin L.
• Position: Business travel statistics - Business Talk

Are you traveling less on business these days? Did you get a memo that asked you to cut out all unnecessary business trips? Many executives have decreased their time on the road, but that doesn't mean companies are spending less on travel and entertainment.

"Companies perceive they've cut back on travel," says Christine Levite, of American Express Travel-Related Services Company, "because individuals are traveling less," but that's not the whole picture. Levite reports that more than 67 percent of the U.S. companies American Express surveyed in 1992 have either increased or maintained their level of business travel since 1990, and that companies are spending a lot more--47 percent more--on travel and entertainment per employee: $3,113 in 1991 compared to $2,121 in 1989.

Levite dissects the increase: "The big increase in the per-employee spending figure is largely attributable to downsizing. When you have fewer employees in a company, your total spending is going to be divided by fewer employees so the total per-employee number is going to go way up. Second, now a broader base of the corporate population is traveling. With this downsizing, you're seeing lower-level managers and even secretaries, who 10 years ago never would have traveled, get on a plane to go to a training session, for example."

Is all this travel necessary? Levite thinks so. She says American Express just held its first worldwide travel meeting in 12 years, flying in travel managers from 1,700 offices to brainstorm "what in the heck we're going to do with our business." Like any large company facing change or restructuring, she says, American Express needed to bring together everyone to "lay out a vision, a plan."

Doug Curling, controller of financial practices for Atlanta-based Equifax, Inc., agrees. "Like a lot of corporations, the rate we're going through changes internally is dramatically increasing. Because we need to manage change, and change begets a lot of interaction. I think that drives a lot of the travel."

Equifax's travel function has reported directly to Curling for the last year, moving from a staff function when the company decided it needed to focus more on the cost issues. Under...