You've got platinum status. Mega miles. Upgrades on demand. Face it, you're a new economy slave.
Survival Tips
If hell is "the middle seat in the back row of a 757 with the smell of rancid lasagna wafting in the air" - as one frequent-flying Silicon Valley executive recently defined it - then Evan Orensten has at least managed to avoid hell today, what with his reserved aisle seat in front of the wing. Unfortunately, heaven is booked solid.
Orensten, an executive vice president at Razorfish, the hot Web design and consulting firm, has just learned that his Newark-to-London flight is packed, so there's no chance he can talk his way into a freebie upgrade to first class. Sure, he could simply pay more for a first-class ticket, but that usually isn't done at cash-burning yet conspicuously frugal startups like his. The high tech nouveau riche still tend to fly coach because, as Excite cofounder Joe Kraus says, it's an acknowledgment that "we recently came from the garage and could just as easily go back." The bankers may pay for first class; so may the Microsoft guys who haven't yet bought their own Gulfstreams. Everyone else strives to buy with the masses, get upgraded, and recline with the classes.
Today, there will be no miracles for Orensten, even though he's been known to cadge great seats by plying check-in attendants with Razorfish T-shirts, notepads, CDs, and compliments. ("I'm very good at kissing butt with these people," he admits.) The only other way up would be to cash in a few frequent-flier miles, but Orensten, 33, hoards those like a miser as he marches toward magical status in the 100K club - 100,000 miles in the air for the year - which brings with it automatic upgrades and free tickets.
"It's all about the miles, and this isn't worth losing them," he says, smiling and stretching out in United's Red Carpet lounge, resting up for what lies ahead.
Here's what lies ahead: A 7:30 p.m. red-eye, which deposits Orensten in London at 7 a.m. local time, where he checks in to the Lufthansa lounge. He stays only two hours, long enough to stretch his coach-cramped legs, at which point a call reminds him to lurch onto another plane. At 11 a.m. he lifts off to Hamburg, where Razorfish has an office. The gods smile on him - he's upgraded to business class! But the seats aren't much bigger, and the only noticeable difference, he grumbles, is that "you get your mayonnaise sandwich on a plate instead of in a napkin." With the plane aloft somewhere over France, Orensten fires up his laptop and composes some emails detailing a few in-flight gripes.
"Movies on last night's flights: You've Got Mail (urgh), Waking Ned Devine (seen it at least five times) ... Did not have my low-fat meal, so boycotted and didn't eat. Halfway into my chemically induced sleep I was forced to get up and let someone sit in the empty seat next to me because their video screen didn't work. I asked if they had to see You've Got Mail that badly. Decided that I much prefer the 9:30 p.m. flight on Virgin."
After a stay in Hamburg, Orensten flies to Stockholm for a business meeting. Then it's back to London. Then back to Hamburg. Then to Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, and home, which for Orensten is a relative term - that's where he lives only about 25 percent of the time. He has no wife or kids, and his friends are compartmentalized by city: the Paris group, the Hamburg gang, the New York crowd. In an email, I suggest that this is an interesting way to live one's life. To which Orensten replies: "What life?"
Orensten is a "hyperflier," a relatively new species whose members spend more time aloft than aground. They're commonly found swirling in the realms of high tech, finance, media, and consulting - all the brave-new-world industries that are raging with bull-market energy right now. The hyperfliers' destinations may differ, but their distinguishing characteristics are consistently the same. You can spot them in various ways:
They self-identify by the extent of their flying. Net design consultant Clement Mok is a 150K man, for instance, logging 150,000 miles a year as he crisscrosses the country. There are "200 day" people who fly that many days per year. Hank Nothhaft, chair of Concentric Network, can top all that. He's a 3 million-mile guy - 3 million being his lifetime total of miles logged on American Airlines alone.
They speak in a coded language that has evolved in airport culture. "I'm going from GSO into BOS," reads an email from Nick Shelness, the chief technology officer at Lotus, "then flying out of BOS terminal E on a 20:20 BA to LHR."
They know more than any healthy person should about the legroom and seat pitch on a 757 as compared with, say, a DC-10. "I won't fly a 757 except under extreme duress," says Jeff Drazan, a VC with Sierra Ventures. (He means it, too: To avoid the relatively cramped 757s, he'll switch airlines if necessary.)
They're obsessed with packing efficiently and will go to ingenious measures to travel light - like FedExing clean shirts to their next destination. "Cuts down on baggage," says Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, who pioneered this technique.
They describe outrageous itineraries with nonchalance. "I departed from California to London," says Diane Fraiman, marketing VP at Informix, "then on to Johannesburg, then to Nelspruit - where they have the white rhinos! - then connected in Cape Town, back to Johannesburg, on to London, ending up in San Francisco. A typical week." And they're proud. They share such details expecting to earn admiration, awe, even sympathy. "Telling people how much you fly is a badge of honor," says Vickie Abrahamson, a trend analyst with Iconoculture. "It shows how much you can take."
Though their ranks are constantly swelling, they are, for the most part, solitary. "There is no 'community' in the air," says Larry Downes, an ecommerce expert and author. "Those of us who fly regularly have the kindness to leave each other alone - one less chance for a bad interaction."
Often, they don't look so good. "We know each other by sight," Downes says. "The pallid complexion, red watery eyes, deeply furrowed brow, the look of hunger for home, for edible food and a sleepable bed."
They are everywhere ... and nowhere. "I don't know what time zone I live in," says Informix CEO Bob Finocchio, a 200K man. "I think I live in some average time zone between New York and Chicago ... maybe Pittsburgh. I don't know."
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Technology was going to shrink and link the world, and in so doing, render one's physical location practically irrelevant. That's why, just a few years ago, the airlines were fretting about the growth of the Internet, email, and videoconferencing. The ultimate fear: Would business travel become obsolete?
Those worries have vanished in the stratosphere. Even with the tech revolution in full swing, the airlines have been enjoying record-level profits over the last two years. Occupancy rates are higher than ever, and demand for first- and business-class seats is so feverish that some airlines are downsizing coach sections to open more room up front. Rates on nonweekend flights have soared. (Want to fly business class from Los Angeles to London? Try $7,400 round-trip.) For most airlines, the lion's share of profits is coming from hyperfliers - many of whom, like Orensten, are not just users of information technology, but developers of it. In a strange irony, the enemy has become the airlines' best customer. Hyperfliers are the unplanned progeny of the ménage à trois involving technology, global business expansion, and savvy airline marketing.
Why did it happen? Several reasons. As the global economy exploded during the past decade, communications technology fueled the expansion but did not obliterate the need for face-to-face meetings. "Technology allowed businesses like ours to get customers in remote places where we didn't have a physical presence," says Dennis DeAndre of LoopNet, a real estate listings site. "But you still had to get on a plane and go there to really make things happen."
Indeed, technology serves merely as a starting point in long distance business relationships. To do the hard stuff - closing deals, putting out fires, brainstorming, securing financing, kicking butt - you have to materialize on the spot. So the Net actually has put more people in the air, a phenomenon that might be called Saffo's Law.
"If you talk to someone electronically," explains Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California, "it will inevitably lead to a face-to-face meeting."
Which in turn leads to Saffo's Corollary. "If you hate flying," he says, "kill your computer."
Videoconferencing might have prevented all this, but it hasn't, mainly because most people hate it. "It's a hideous medium," says the Doblin Group's Joe Crump. "People become bizarrely self-conscious, and unnaturally fixated on the person on TV and less on the people in the room." Crump's gripe is echoed throughout the business world, along with complaints about delays in transmission and compatibility problems.
"There's no value in a fuzzy picture of people sitting around a conference table," says T. J. Rodgers, founder of Cypress Semiconductor. "I spent $50,000 installing a system, and now I don't even bother going into the conference room to use it. I'll give you the whole thing for the price of hauling it away."
The final jet-booster of this trend is the airlines' extraordinarily successful frequent-flier programs, which have provided the burgeoning hyperflier culture with its own currency, lexicon, and class structure.
At the heart of it all: the miles. There are ever more ways to collect them and to cash them in. Today, nearly 20,000 businesses in the US are giving away flying miles. Corporations give miles to employees as part of annual bonuses. On the Internet, Netcentives and MyPoints.com offer "click miles" for buying something or for simply completing a marketing survey for retailers like Barnes & Noble. Miles can be cashed in for hotel stays, vacation packages, even non-travel-related perks. Last fall, American Airlines pilot-tested a new program with MCI that trades miles for free long distance phone calls.
When hyperfliers like Orensten talk about miles, it's almost as if they're discussing stock options. Last year, Orensten used his miles for a trip to Australia. "The whole thing cost $30 in tax!" he says in a conspiratorial tone. Nothhaft, of Concentric Network, uses his miles for what he calls "crazy vacations, like taking my family to Hawaii for a football game." Though hyperfliers spend half their lives on planes, it somehow doesn't diminish the appeal of mileage awards, which allow them to spend even more time aloft.
The hyperfliers may think they're getting something for nothing, but they're actually playing the airlines' game. By tightly restricting free flights, airlines have rigged it so that a passenger flying for free almost never displaces a paying customer, and typically costs the airline only about $20 per flight. But to earn that $20 flight, hyperfliers will go out of their way to book all their tickets on one airline, and may waste hundreds or thousands of dollars building their status.
"People will do anything to get to the 100K level," says Mark Kvamme, chair of USWeb/CKS. "We had a guy here who, at the very end of the year, took a golf trip to Arizona for no other reason than to push himself over 100K." According to a University of Georgia study, billions of dollars in corporate money are wasted each year chasing frequent-flier miles.
There is more to it than the perks and free trips, though: It's also a style thing. Rob White, president of United's ad agency, Fallon McElligott, says the airlines have figured out that for some people, the real appeal of frequent-flier rewards "is not that you get more free travel, it's that you're accorded status and recognition. You're recognized as a supremely important traveler."
In other words, you use your miles to move up the food chain. Which means you don't have to stand in line or sit in the back of the plane with those other people, the ones Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson cheekily calls "riff-raff." It means you eat pork tenderloin with apple confit, get fussed over by attendants, and, most important, don't get your laptop crushed into your body by the seat in front of you.
It's enough to make even an up-from-the-garage centimillionaire from Silicon Valley desperate for a touch of class.
It's 7 a.m. on a Monday, and, as usual, they're circling testily around the check-in desk for the Nerd Bird, American Airlines' direct flight from San Jose to Austin. The flight didn't even exist until several years ago, when T. J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor wrote to a marketing director at American Airlines. Rodgers pointed out that Silicon Valley travelers were connecting their asses off every day, trying to get to other technology hot spots like Austin, Boston, and New York. Give us a direct flight, he told them, and we will fill it.
They didn't believe him at first. But a direct flight from San Jose to Austin filled up right away. Soon they added another in the afternoon. A red-eye was added to another Nerd Bird, from San Jose to Boston, and American upped the number of nonstops from San Jose to New York. "We kept adding flights, and they kept filling up," says Tim Smith, a spokesperson for American Airlines.
The Nerd Bird's passengers are often 80 percent tech people, and the flight is legendary for its sartorial level (low), technical quotient (high), and onboard corporate espionage. A sales director for Seagate Technology once boasted in print about how he reached for his briefcase and saw a rival company's business plan under the seat in front of him. No, he didn't steal it, but he did pick it up and read every word before putting it back. Hyperfliers like Dave Sheffler, VP of sales for Advanced Micro Devices, can be seen glancing over their shoulders as they whisper into the air phone. "You have to be careful," says Sheffler. "You never know who's sitting behind you."
Paranoia and deceit notwithstanding, the Nerd Bird is a kind of utopia - almost everyone on board, owing to their miles, has attained some level of privileged status. There are no serfs here, only royalty; when the gate attendant announces, "We'll be boarding our gold and platinum members first," it seems as if everyone rises and heads for the jet. The only stragglers I see during my Nerd Bird trip are people jockeying for last-minute upgrades into first class, including, I observe, a bearded fellow wearing a ball cap. The gate attendant calls his name and he calmly strolls to the plane. In a few minutes, as I head for my coach seat, I will pass him stretched out in the first row, his morning coffee already served to him (in a real porcelain cup!). Others waiting for upgrades are not so fortunate and mill around the check-in desk, hoping and looking bereft.
Why does it matter so much? Most hyperfliers insist they get more work done up front, but it's really about status. The class structure on airplanes is the most rigid in the Western world.
"It's an incredibly emotional issue," says Christopher Meyer, director of Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation and coauthor of the book Blur. "Flying first class is a kind of territorial battle among animals. Who's gold, who's platinum, who's got the status and the perks."
"It's unbelievable how strongly class lines are drawn on planes," says Tim Delaney, a renowned ad man. "The curtains separating first class may as well be fucking steel doors."
One might expect that airplane snobbery would have no place in the Silicon Valley culture of egalitarian info-revolutionaries, but one would be very wrong. Meyer notes that a big part of the Silicon Valley mind-set involves "being countercultural in a visible way. Wearing jeans and a bomber jacket in first class makes a statement - that first class is where I belong, even though I don't adhere to the conventions."
Delaney, who flies with the Valley crowd often as he travels to his San Francisco office, sums it up this way: "They wear shorts and all that, but they're as venal as anyone from New York."
But while the techies have begun to lust after first class, it's not cool to pay for it.
Most tech companies still have a "coach only" policy on domestic flights, says Silicon Valley travel agent George Oberle. And even if they could, many would be loathe to fork over the premium because it suggests profligacy - and there is always a chance they may run into their banker on the plane. Financiers always fly first class themselves, but they're not impressed by techies who do likewise. "It does not send a good message about how you are spending the money," says Danny Rimer, a senior analyst at Hambrecht & Quist.
Excite's Kraus says: "There's a stigma to buying first class - you're supposed to be able to get it without paying for it." Often, it's the midlevel guys who fly the most and get first crack at upgrades. Which means, sometimes, "you end up with a weird situation in which a company's senior managers are sitting in the back, with the junior guys up front," says Rimer. When that happens, if the juniors are smart, "they give up that front row seat without being asked," says Rimer. Likewise, if someone in the service sector ends up sitting in front of a client, it can be awkward. "I've been in first class and seen a client back in coach, and it makes you feel like a decadent sleazebag," says Doblin's Crump. Sometimes, he says, "you have to fly coach for solidarity."
Walking the aisles of the San Jose-Austin Nerd Bird, moving from first class to the cattle car, you'd never suspect you were traversing such a social minefield. On a surface level, the only question that seems to matter is: Can we turn on our laptops yet? As we reach cruising altitude, the soft whirring sound of hard drives revving up can be heard all around. When you take the evening Nerd Bird, the computer screens fill the darkened cabin with an eerie green glow.
Today I'm in the midst of a 16-hour, four-stop circle run around the country: New York to Boston to San Jose to Austin to Dallas to New York. A true hyperflier would not be impressed by this run. (Delaney recently flew 26 hours for a meeting that lasted exactly 30 minutes.) Still, for a groundling, this trip provides a pretty fair taste of the hyperflier life and its routine trials and humiliations. Along the way, I endure stomach-churning turbulence over Boston; a screening of Stepmom on the way to San Jose; and sheer, utter chaos in Dallas, where flights, including mine, have been canceled and packs of elderly people wearing Nikes are cruelly herded from one gate to another for flights that never materialize. I do catch one break along the way; on Austin-Dallas, an airline mistake works in my favor as I get bumped to first class, my lack of status notwithstanding. I sip chardonnay and stretch my legs for an hour. But on Dallas-New York, the gods get even: I'm stuck in the last row, next to two lanky guys with shaved heads who repeatedly punch each other in the shoulder. One is reading American Psycho and keeps running across parts that make him laugh.
With all the built-in annoyances - the cancellations, the oddballs, the endless bags of Rold Gold Tiny Twists pretzels - it's little wonder that hyperfliers are world-class gripers. They may be hooked on the miles, but that doesn't mean they're happy junkies. Downes describes flying as "the most unpleasant experience outside of visiting a hospital." Finocchio's had it with the new carry-on rules. "It's not like I'm trying to bring a toaster oven on," he fumes. "I'm talking about garment bags!" GreenTree Nutrition CEO Don Kendall complains that "they keep reducing the seat pitch. You can barely open your laptop. The plane really has turned into the Greyhound bus of the skies."
Grumpiest of all is Faith Popcorn, the famous "trend spotter," who still holds out hope that teleconferencing will slay the mighty airline beast. "You're mistreated at the counter checking in," she begins. "It's impossible to get an upgrade. The food is terrible. The attendants cross their arms while you try to store your bags in first class. The bathrooms are filthy. And don't even think about looking down in that little area where the tray tables are stored. Everybody who flies is going uchh! They've had it with the airlines. The airline industry is over."
Air rage may be the next big trend, but the industry outlook is robust. Videoconferencing will have to improve a lot before it has an impact on air travel, and for the near future, that isn't happening.
"The future is already here," says Jonathan Schlesinger, president of Connexus. "The current technology won't change much in 10 years - you'll still see someone on a screen; you still will not be able to touch them or be in the same room." The delivery system may change, perhaps to Internet-based, "but as long as the quality's the same, who cares how it's done?"
Most likely, infotech will continue to be the unwitting ally of airlines. Nothhaft predicts that as satellite feeds improve real-time email and fax and access to the Internet, "we can be more productive on planes - so we'll travel even more." Saffo offers this surreal vision: "We will spend all our time in airplanes, and we will videoconference from the plane with our travel agents on the ground. We'll just go round and round, and the plane will never land."
Assuming that more flight is inevitable, there is, of course, still the hope that the experience will improve through better aero-technology. Someday, we may take off in VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) planes with swiveling engines and downward jet propulsion. The plane will lift off vertically, which won't require a runway - hence we won't have to wait for the runway to clear. Once airborne, we may be flying at supersonic speed, or we may be in a "hypersoar" plane with an air-breathing engine that accelerates to high altitudes then coasts in space, with the engine re-activating as soon as it reenters the atmosphere. All of this is going to happen, without a doubt, says Stanley Hiller, whose Hiller Aviation Institute brings together top aviation experts to project future developments.
But it won't happen soon. For now, supersonic travel is impractical and unaffordable (British Airways continues to offer $10,000 seats on the Concorde). Meanwhile, Boeing's explorations of high-speed commercial transport have been shelved; NASA cut funding last January because of noise problems. In other words, "aviation has reached a dead end" in terms of immediate tech advancements. Boeing spokesperson Mary Jean Olsen admits: "For the next 25 years, you can expect planes to stay basically the same in terms of the speed and the way they look." (If anything, you can probably expect planes to become increasingly dysfunctional in the years ahead. As one flight attendant confessed on a recent flight: "We never fly anymore with everything working. Business is so good, they just want to keep the planes in the air. Movies, footrests - if it's not a no-go item, they just leave it broken.")
So this is your life, hyperfliers; deal with it. The airlines, kind souls that they are, will provide one enhancement: They're going to entertain the hell out of you on the plane. Michael J. Wolf, a consultant with Booz-Allen & Hamilton and the author of The Entertainment Economy, points out that it's already happening: Last year, Wolf notes, the airlines spent $2 billion on installing entertainment systems.
"Airlines feel they can crowd more people in, as long as they give them something to do in their seats," says Wolf. That means not just 20 channels of movies-on-demand, but other forms of diversion - including gambling (seatback keno and blackjack screens are already being tested). The whole focus "is not to get you there faster," says Wolf, "but to entertain you more, and get more revenue out of you, along the way."
Some hyperfliers are not amused. Downes predicts a war with the airlines. "They've got the guns, but we've got the numbers," he says. Yet this assumes that fliers, who've been splintered by class and set against one another, could somehow unite. Not likely. The more credible scenario is that part of the culture - the most powerful, wealthiest part - will simply secede. You can already see this happening in the Virgin "Clubhouse" at Newark airport, where a pair of unmarked black doors is the gateway to a walled-off community. As I pass through the hushed room inside, there's a gourmet buffet on my right serving marinated sliced beef fillet in a Madeira sauce. To my left, there's an enclosed entertainment booth where a few people are lounging on a sofa watching a James Bond film on DVD with surround sound. (In London Heathrow's version of this lounge, you can practice your turns on a simulated ski slope, or flop face-down for a massage.)
Every attempt is being made to sequester high rollers from the rest of the airport. Directly below us, there's a drive-up window; preferred customers pull up in their limos, and a Virgin attendant walks up to the car, takes the bags from the driver, and hands over the boarding pass. Then you're hustled up a back staircase, like a movie star, into the Clubhouse, and then directly onto the plane. Onboard, the experience of separation continues. In the newest Virgin planes being built now, first-class passengers can descend a staircase into private chambers, with a bed and shower.
Increasingly, too, the more powerful hyperfliers are turning to private jets. And suddenly more can afford it because of jet time-sharing, which "is revolutionizing corporate air travel," says John Hendricks, founder of the Discovery Channel, whose company owns a one-eighth share of a Hawker 1000. With the airlines now pricing business flights through the roof, fractional jets begin to seem reasonable when divided among a group of executives. If you're wondering about the future of jet time-sharing, Hendricks says, consider the fact that Warren Buffett has thrown his money behind Executive Jet, one of the pioneers in the category.
Of course, there's one more option for the elite, which doesn't involve concealed chambers on planes or time-shares in the sky: Stay grounded. "More and more, senior executives are sending the young lions out there," says travel agent Oberle. "They don't want to fly anymore." Iconoculture's Abrahamson concurs: "The upper-level executives are already starting to hire young traveling teams, global employees who don't really have a home."
This is the new, stationary elite - those who use their power to stay put. "The luxury is to have the intellectual capital come to you," says Meyer. "We see it in diplomatic protocol, and in Hollywood. Who-goes-to-whom is important; I believe this all got started with the mountain and Muhammad."
And hyperflying execs are ready to hang up their miles. "Before, I used to fly to meetings for a day," says Lotus' Shelness. "This year I'm saying, 'I'm not going to go. I'll videoconference, I'll get on the phone, I'll email. But I won't go.' I've never really tried this before. At the end of the year, I'll look back and see if it's been a disaster."
But even if the fast-paced business world permits them to cut back, the hyperfliers will face an adjustment on the ground. "We all complain about travel," says Finocchio, "but deep down, we'd be more uncomfortable strapped to our chairs in the office."
Evan Orensten insists he has little choice but to fly on behalf of his growing company, and he isn't ready to land just yet. En route to Stockholm, on his third flight of the day, he writes another email from the clouds: "Where am I?" he writes. "Somewhere over Denmark, I think ..."
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