Travelling can drive you crazy

I find business travel exceptionally tiring.

On Thursday evening I was homeward bound with longtime business colleague Bryan Hirsch, after a series of meetings with clients in Cape Town.

We found ourselves snarled in traffic on the way to the airport.

Our flight to Johannesburg was at 6pm and it was only 4.15pm, but the minutes began to tick by faster than we were inching forward.

At each turn on the highway we seemed to encounter yet another on-ramp jammed with vehicles heading home to the suburbs.

We tried to mask our stress as we crawled along by making small talk and listening to stock market updates on the radio, but we lapsed into silence when we realised that, unless the traffic eased soon, there was a strong chance we would have to battle for seats on a later flight, extending what was already a long and demanding day.

I was at a slight advantage to Bryan, having printed my return trip boarding pass when I booked in that morning at Oliver Tambo, allowing me to head directly to the gate as soon as we made it to the airport. Bryan still had to negotiate those annoying queues at the check-in counter, crowded with tourists overburdened with luggage and clumsily packed souvenirs.

Fortunately, we both made it with minutes to spare, but not without extracting some toll on our life expectancy.

As I drove my rented car into the return lane, still facing a 500m dash to the departure gate (who designed the airport?), I was overcome by pangs of envy for the lifestyle of the privileged lot gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, who were ferried to and from their venues in corporate jets, express helicopters and trendy limousines.

I fantasised how wonderful it must be to work for an organisation that could agreeably spend hundreds of thousands of rands for its executives to rub shoulders with the world's business, social and political elite for three days, footing the bill unconscionably for the high cost of membership, first-class flights, lavish entertainment tabs and fares at luxury hotels that would make even a Capetonian innkeeper quiver.

In my humble position I could hardly justify those demands but, I reasoned, I would gladly settle for the treat of being chauffeured to and from the airport and of flying business class, where the cutlery hurts if you drop it on your toe, where you have enough elbow room to read a broadsheet newspaper, and where your jacket is hung neatly in a cupboard rather than being crushed into the overhead locker.

Corporate perks like executive pay are a complex, thorny issue in which it is particularly difficult to find a suitable balance between appropriateness and appearance, extravagance and ego.

When the usually parsimonious Warren Buffett bought a corporate jet a few years ago, his lifelong friend and business partner Charlie Munger approved his folly on condition that he named the craft "Indefensible".

But these days Buffett justly claims that, without the handiness of his personal plane, he would not have concluded a number of corporate deals.

Not only has he saved costly time he would have spent hanging around aimlessly at airports waiting to board a plane or catch a connection but, the convenience of studying and discussing papers in privacy during flights without the gaze of snooping passengers has clearly justified his expensive purchase.

Buffett's reasoning makes fine sense. I thought of the number of reports I could have read, e-mails I could have answered and phone calls I could have made sitting comfortably in the back of a car instead of bumbling along Settlers Way, behind the wheel of my manual Hyundai, sweating in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

But where does one draw the line? As I walked down the aisle to my seat beyond the "curtain of shame" - the divide between them and us - I questioned whether paying all that extra cash for a place up front would really increase my chances of finding the mysterious link to the fountain of prosperity that would surely underwrite an invitation for me to join the exclusive club at Davos.

Unlikely, I settled; few companies today, understandably, are prepared to squander stakeholders' money sanctioning exorbitant business class fares for short trips or the cost of a luxury hotel room used for nothing more than a hot shower and brief snooze.

I impaled a piece of dried fish on my plastic fork and wondered whether, for example, I would think anything less of Absa Bank if CEO Maria Ramos were seated behind me in 16B, between the motor parts rep and Spanish tourist. On the contrary.