Back in Circulation

May 12, 2024 by Jay Cuthrell

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This week we take a look at what’s next in post-pandemic travel and apps potpourri.

Housekeeping

I’ve just returned from Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest in Denver this week where I spent time with the amazing folks at Elevate Technology User Group.

The best part of events like Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest is the community and sharing of knowledge.

BTW, if you missed any of my LinkedIn updates during Red Hat Summit, I’ve summarized them in a LinkedIn Article. (see below)

Looking ahead

🗓️ Later this month, I am headed to Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. If you’ll be in Las Vegas too, let’s meet at Elevate Technology User Group. Register now: https://bit.ly/etug-at-dtw-2024 🎫 🎟️

🗓️ Next month, I am honored to be a Tech Field Day delegate at Qlik Connect in Orlando.

🗓️ Want to combine forces or see your event listed here? Let’s chat!

Getting Informed

Traveling for work has changed for me. Arguably, traveling for work is still changing for me.

I share this bromide as someone who spent a lot of time in planes, trains, automobiles, and years of life in hotels around the world. This trend, for me, will likely continue for a few more years.

From 1995 to 2009, I traveled a lot both domestically and internationally. So, when TripIt launched in 2006 I began tracking things more closely and connected it to work travel in 2009.

According to TripIt, my carbon footprint keeps growing.

Distance Traveled: 2M+ miles
Total Days: 3000+
Total Trips: 1000+
Countries/Regions Visited: 15+
Cities Visited: 300+
Carbon Footprint: 400+ tCO2 🤯

According to TripIt, my air travel since 2009 is equivalent to powering ~50 US homes for a year. To offset just the most recent carbon footprint associated with air travel alone, I’d need to plant around 60k trees on the landmass equivalent to the ~30 stadiums in use by Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. Now, my math might be off here — but one could argue remote work for knowledge workers has distinct advantages as compared to work travel and commuting for work.

Also, according to McKinsey, the backlog for aircraft is staggeringly large (~16k open-order backlog) which means the demand to increase our collective carbon footprint is staggeringly large too. Looking ahead, similar to our fixation with nutritional labeling in the US, I expect that every travel brand will present the carbon footprint of the experience in an increasingly conspicuous manner.

What to do? Well, my morning walk to co-working in The Vault is my act locally think globally action of late.

Plan of record

Michael Cote’s Wastebook and Wunderkammer shared a great idea for any newsletter: Including key dates and places you plan to be in the newsletter. For the last few Fudge Sunday weekly updates, I adopted the practice as well.

Essentially, you’ll increase the probability of happy collisions by letting more folks know where you’ll be ahead of time. I tried this with TripIt for a while before the SAP/Concur M&A turducken.

While I’m not sharing exactly where I’ll be in real-time, it is close enough to further coordinate with others at events. In terms of OpSec, those days of beaconing location via Foursquare are long gone whereas a decade ago, I connected my real-time Foursquare check-in location to my blog posts via a simplistic IFTTT recipe.

While I do miss the immediacy of fun IFTTT integrations, OpSec times changed. As such, work travel has changed.

There is always an app

When air travel cannot be avoided, one app that I am finding to be very helpful is Flighty. I don’t know how it does it but it manages to be better than the native airline apps I use for flight status, ETA, and other fun visualizations of the trip underway.

Another app I’ve rediscovered recently is AirBnB. Again, I’ve lived years of my life in Marriot properties, Hilton properties, and the like — and changing it up by getting to experience non-hotel surroundings and public transport has been educational.

For ground transportation, I’ve enjoyed cities where investments in public transportation and their apps are evident.

CapMetro in Austin
BART in San Francisco
MARTA in Atlanta
RTD in Denver
TripLinx in Toronto

Where to next

Setting aside so-called “Revenge Travel” for 2024, I expect that client meetings will drive 75% of my work travel. For the remaining 25%, there are other options.

A few more apps that I’ve rediscovered are Eventbrite, Luma, Meetup, and Whova. These apps are useful when you know you are going to be in a city for an event or conference and want to understand what parallel serendipitous events might also overlap with your stay.

There are also aggregator websites to consider. Great curation often begins on a website vs. an app.

For example, Techmeme Events are my new favorite list of TripIt placeholders. After all, I am back in circulation now.

You might imagine that some smart startup out there is already working on getting A.I. to synthesize all of the above for bespoke personalized serendipitous itinerary options. You are not wrong.

iPlan AI
Where Next – check out this example of a digital nomad trip to Raleigh, NC next week
And many many more

What’s the next big technology evolution going to be in work travel?

Until then… place your bets.

Disclosure

I am linking to my disclosure.

p.s. As I’ve gotten older, I have come to appreciate getting snail mail. If you have time to drop me a postcard, I’m going to be scanning the picture side of the postcards I’ve received and link to a Fudge Sunday Reader Postcards gallery (with suitable redactions and filtering for greater anonymity) as a newsletter trailer of sorts. Stay tuned! ✉️

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✍️ 🤓 Edit on Github 🐙 ✍️

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Back in Circulation

Share and discuss on LinkedIn or HN

Share and discuss on LinkedIn or HN

Get Fudge Sunday each week