Flying around the world as a business traveler seems like the dream, a company paying all the expenses, eating exotic foods, and meeting people from different cultures. The lifestyle, however, is not all it is cracked up to be. People who frequently fly for their work encounter many significant challenges the average worker does not face.
10 Reasons Why It Sucks Being a Frequent Business Traveler
The following ten reasons demonstrate the downsides that a traveler faces when their company sends them on frequent business trips. This list may make you rethink your dream to get a job that requires traveling weekly all over the world.
Makes You Less Healthy
Traveling on a plane frequently is bound to have its pitfalls. One of the downsides business people who travel a lot face is they are less healthy than the average person. They also usually have higher blood pressure and cholesterol than the average person. Business travelers also age faster because of their fast-paced lifestyle.
Homesickness
One of the caveats of traveling around the world is you are sometimes more familiar with a hotel room than your home. While this may appear glamorous and adventurous in the beginning, it eventually can get very lonely as there is barely any time to see family, friends, or pets. Many times a businessman’s biggest dream is to sleep in his bed.
Extra Stress
While traveling may seem like a stress-free time to relax, it must be remembered companies are not paying their employees to take a vacation, they are paying them to work. Business trips are many times much more stressful than the average workday because there is much more pressure to succeed and do well at the task at hand. Traveling can mean that the person is always experiencing this extra stress and can come to resent working overseas.
Jet Lag
If there is one downside to traveling that everyone can agree on, it is jet lag. Many of these flights have the traveling employee arriving in their country in the middle of the night in a completely different time zone. Some workers even have to get right to work after landing at their destination.
Too Much Fast Food
While it may be fun to eat out at restaurants and try different food once in a while, doing this can be tiresome and dangerous for your health. Employees on trips abroad do not usually have a lot of time because they are working and usually end up eating takeout or the hotel’s room service. These are not the healthiest eating options, and the menus usually have foods high in calories. Even when people in business eat out at restaurants for company meals, the options are not normally much healthier.
High BMI
Extra stress, jet lag, homesickness, and bad health seem terrible enough until you realize the side effects that occur because of them. Many traveling employees because of these factors are frequently overweight or at least have a higher BMI than the average person. Being overweight can lead to a myriad of health problems and is one of the definite cons of traveling around the world frequently.
Culture Shock
Jet setting around the world and experiencing different cultures may appear to be glamorous, but it can also lead to culture shock. Being far away from your home and being tossed into a culture completely different than your own when you are exhausted can lead to extra stress and increased loneliness.
Mental Health Challenges
Business travelers while experiencing frequent physical health problems can also experience many psychological problems because they travel so frequently. Depression and anxiety are mental health issues that many employees overseas experience and are exacerbated even more because of their working environment.
Difficult to Maintain Relationships
Another reason frequently traveling for business sucks is being far away from home constantly puts a strain on relationships with family and friends. Many business globetrotters find they have complicated relationships with their loved ones and that it is difficult to maintain a romantic relationship. This factor can further increase a person’s loneliness.
Not a Tourist
One component of traveling for work people forget is you are not a tourist. People traveling for business do not have the opportunity most times to visit tourist sites and see the city they are visiting. Many times they are cooped up in a business meeting for the whole time they are in their destination.
The life of a business traveler is not as attractive as it may appear to be to the outside viewer. It is full of challenges, stress, and loneliness. So before you take that promotion that promises excellent business trips around the world, keep these facts in mind and share them with your friends.
Tips for a Frequent Traveler
If you are traveling sometime soon, you may need to find travel luggage to make your trip a success, or perhaps a travel backpack might do the trick. Make sure you take some other accessories along, like a travel neck pillow, phone charger, and such. See below for some other tips.
