Administrative Arts » Travel

Ask the Admin: Staying in Touch While Traveling

Jodith — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:00:21 +0000

Lisa sent me the following e-mail:

Do you have any tips or advice for communicating daily, weekly or priority items when traveling for weeks at a time.

Thanks for your e-mail, Lisa. As it happens, I worked for 3 years for one boss who traveled almost 50% of his time, so I learned a great deal about how to keep in touch while he was traveling.

Make Sure You Have a Plan

If you have a boss who travels frequently, you need to have a plan in place to make sure the two of you stay in touch while he’s out of the office. Make sure you sit down together a day or two before he leaves to discuss things that might come up while he’s gone. Some of the topics to cover are:

Any current issues that may come to a head while he’s out, and who is in charge of those issues while he’s away.
What types of issues he expects to be notified about immediately.
What types of issues can wait until you next talk.
What issues can wait until he’s back in the office.
Who is in charge of what departments while he’s out (i.e. who’s the go-to person for different issues that may come up).
How often will he contact you while he’s out of the office. Usually, depending on the time difference, my boss would contact me once or twice a day to touch base and go over any pending problems. If anything of an emergent nature comes up, I would contact him (sometimes in the middle of the night if he was in Asia).

Having a plan in place before your boss leaves can relieve a lot of stress on the part of you both while he’s traveling.

Monitoring E-mail

Usually when people travel for business, their schedules are pretty tight, and they don’t have time to keep up with their daily e-mail. Make sure and find out if your boss wants you manage his e-mail in a more hands-on basis than normal. A boss that generally only wants you to keep an overview of his e-mail may want you to take point when he’s traveling. For my boss, I would set up a folder called “For When You Return”, and I would put all non-urgent messages there. He could glance at them if he had time, but he knew none were urgent and could wait for his return. I’d often send phone messages to him by e-mail and file them in that folder as well. Any urgent e-mail I would turn red so he’d see it immediately when he checked his e-mail. And, of course, any e-mail that was of an emergent nature I would call him about. If it’s something you normally do, you would continue to delegate any issues to others that are appropriate.

It’s a Trust Issue

The most important thing if you have a boss who travels frequently is to have built a high level of trust. The boss needs to know that you can make appropriate decisions about what needs to be delegated, what can wait, and what needs an immediate notification. This is the kind of trust that is only built over time, and it requires cooperation from your boss to build the knowledge and trust necessary. If your boss doesn’t talk to you regularly about his work and his priorities, you aren’t going to have the knowledge necessary to be able to make those types of important decisions, and he won’t feel comfortable leaving delegated responsibility with you when he travels. It’s another reason why it’s so important to push your boss about having a daily meeting. You need to be a partner with your boss if you are going to be able to do everything he needs when he’s away.

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Easily Manage Time Zones

Jodith — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:53:20 +0000

photo credit: leoplus

Does your boss do a lot of international business? Does your company do business all over the world? Then you’ve probably dealt with the dilemma of trying to set up international conference calls, or arranging a business call with a client or colleague in another country or on another continent. With all of the changes in Daylight Savings Time lately, figuring out time changes has just gotten harder. Well, I’ve got a solution for you.

timeandate.com

timeanddate.com has a number of valuable tools to help you in dealing with international business:

Meeting Planner – timeanddate.com allows you to enter up to six different locations and provides the relative times in those locations to help you plan the best time for a conference call.
Calendars – you can open calendars for any number of countries along with their various holidays. Invaluable in planning meetings so you aren’t stepping on cultural toes.
World Clock – if you register, you can select cities you need times for regularly so they’re at your fingertips. You can also get a digital clock to display on your website with various world times on it.
International Dialing codes – timeanddate.com will also help you set up calls by providing the international calling codes for your particular call.

If you’re working in international business, timeanddate.com is an indispensable business tool.Similar Posts:

Save Money on Business Travel

Jodith — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:28:34 +0000

With the economy in turmoil, more pressure than ever is being put on companies to cut expenses and save money. Although new technology is making conference calls and video conferences more accessible, employees still have the need to travel for business at times. As an administrative assistant, it’s your responsibility to find the most cost effective manner for employees to travel. I’ve gone out and scoured the web to find some tips to help you out.

Internet vs. Travel Agent

Since airlines stopped paying kickbacks to travel agents, they’ve started charging a fee for booking flights. The fee for an average flight is $27 booked through a travel agent. However, that doesn’t mean that those flights still aren’t the best deal. After you check on-line for flights, call your favorite travel agent to see if they can beat that price. Many travel agencies negotiate special deals for their customers so may be able to beat even the lowest internet deals. It never hurts to check both.

Internet Booking

There are any number of booking sites on the internet. My personal favorite is Orbitz, because it makes sorting by price easy. I still will check Travelocity as well. And before you settle on a price, be sure to check out Southwest Airlines. They don’t usually list their flights with other services, and they may have both a better price and a more direct flight.

Timing is Everything

In general, booking your flight earlier will get you a better rate than flying later. However, that isn’t always the case. If your boss needs to fly at the last minute, call the airline directly and ask for a discounted rate. If they have empty seats, they’d rather sell it at a discount than let it go empty. You can, indeed, negotiate rates, but you may need to talk to a supervisor to get it.

Another timing tip is to schedule the flight to stay over on a Saturday. Hotels give the airlines kickbacks to encourage hotel stays, so those flights are generally cheaper. You can often pay the cost of the extra night or two in the hotel and still save money on the trip.

If you fly at odd hours like early mornings and late nights, you can also usually get a steep discount. Those flights often fly well below occupancy, so airlines are happy with every fare they can book. Again, if the internet site doesn’t show a discount over other times of the day, call them directly and ask for a discount.

Another strategy is to fly into alternate airports. Many major metropolitan areas have more than one airport. New York has three! So be sure to check flights into an alternate airport if one is convenient. Rates might be lower because it isn’t the preferred airport or is less well known.

Hotel Savings

If you book ahead of time, you can often get a good deal from places like Hotels.com, because they buy up blocks of rooms ahead of time at a steep discount and resell them to the public. However, if your trip is last minute, try calling the hotel directly and asking for a discount. If they have empty rooms, they are sometimes willing to make discounts even greater than those they make for the wholesalers.

Another option is to look for Individually owned or regional chain hotels. They don’t have the numbers to attract the big wholesalers, but at the same time do not have the beauracracy to prevent them making individual deals. Call them directly and give them a chance to beat the internet deals on the big hotel chains.

When you call about a hotel room, be sure to ask for all available discounts. The hotel may have discounts they don’t tell you about unless you ask.

Rental Cars

The best way to save on rental cars is by not renting them! If an employee is flying in for a conference, try to book them at the same hotel and arrange for a shuttle from the hotel to pick them up. If one isn’t available, have them take a taxi to the hotel. If the conference is more than a couple of days, the taxi or shuttle will be cheaper than renting a car for the whole time, not to mention parking. Many hotels in congested urban areas charge fees for parking at the hotel.

If the employee absolutely requires a rental car, make sure that they don’t pay for the optional insurance. Usually the employee’s personal car insurance will cover the rental car. Optional insurance is pure profit for the rental car companies, and many pay hefty bonuses to employees for selling the optional insurance.

Frequent Flyers

If your boss flies frequently, be sure to make use of all frequent flyer programs for which he may qualify. Be aware that many hotel chains and car rental chains also have frequent user programs also. In the long run, these programs can provide significant travel savings.

Feedback

What are your tips for saving money on travel? Enquiring minds want to know.Similar Posts:

Responsibilities While the Boss is Traveling

Jodith — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:26:17 +0000

What are an assistant’s responsibilities while the boss is traveling, especially if she is traveling internationally?

Your responsibilities are going to vary depending on your boss. It’s a good idea to talk to you boss before she travels to get an idea of what she expects. The main question to answer is whether she wants you available the hours she’s working, or wants you to be available during normal business hours to attend to issues while she’s away.

In my experience, most of the time the boss counts on you being available during normal business hours in the office to stay on top of things there and to keep her notified if something urgent comes up. I had one boss who traveled extensively to Europe and Asia. While he was traveling, he expected me to vet issues that came up and decide if it could wait until he returned or if it needed to be handled immediately. He also trusted me to defer to one of his Directors any issues that didn’t need his personal attention.

Generally if my boss needed urgent work done creating or modifying presentations or handouts while travelling, he used someone in the local office or did the work himself. Only a handful of times did he need to call me at night for an urgent issue that needed to be done from my end, usually because he needed file that was on his PC in the office (and he got my usual lecture about keeping files on the network so they are accessible away from the office).

So, here’s some questions to ask your boss before she leaves on a trip:

Should you work normal hours or follow her schedule?
Are any urgent issues pending that she wants to know about when they happen, even if she’s asleep at the time?
What types of issues can be deferred and what ones should be held for her return?

Let’s hear from some of the more experienced admins out there? How do you usually handle things when your boss is traveling?Similar Posts:

Travel Dangers

Jodith — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:06:10 +0000

photo credit: Anirudh Koul

Traveling can be so annoying sometimes, and it’s nice to have company when traveling to take the edge off. However, when booking travel for executives, you need to remember a general rule: all of your executives should not travel together.

Why you ask? It’s a rather morbid consideration, but an important one. If a plane, train or automobile crashes, you risk losing all of your top executives in one fell swoop. Many corporations actually have rules in their by-laws requiring top management to travel separately when attending the same meetings.

So, remember, as nice as it would be for your executives to have company on a long flight, think about the consequences if the worse should happen. This should also apply to department heads as well. If all of the top folks in your department are travelling to the same meeting, you might want to arrange for them to split up on the flights, just to avoid any possibility of a management vacuum if the worst should happen.Similar Posts:

Understanding Airline Bumping

Jodith — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:31:31 +0000

You spend so much time setting up flight arrangements just to find out at the last minute that your boss has been bumped. OfficeArrow has a great post about airline bumping and the consumer’s rights. You’re probably thinking that I’ve now got a bunch of tips to supplement the article, but you know what? I can’t top this one. It’s a great article and information every assistant should know. So go read it….what are you waiting for?Similar Posts:

Ask the Admin – International Travel Arrangements

Jodith — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:06:52 +0000

I had an e-mail this morning from someone who is recently laid off and wants some advice to be able to take her career to the next step. She says”

I have been looking for a new position in the Atlanta area for the past couple of days now. I have realized in order for me to get past the normal $36-40,000, you have to have extensive experience in things like accounts payable/receivable, international travel, etc. in order to make between $50-60,000. I was wondering if you could give me any pointers on International Travel. I see you have some information on your blog and I have read over that information, but I wanted to know if you have any advice for newbie’s.

For those who haven’t seen my previous post on this topic, you can see it here. But I do have a few more tips to add:

Get to know the travel agent your company uses. If your company doesn’t have one, find one! Yes, I know they charge extra for the service since the airlines don’t give the same kind of kickbacks any more, but for international travel, the cost of using the travel agent is well worth the assistance you’ll get. Find one with experience in international travel. Interview them like you would any employee you want to hire. They should be able to tell you about any visa and passport requirements as well as the best airlines for the area your boss will be visiting. Having a good travel agent will save you some serious headaches.
Make sure to check any State Department travel advisories for the area you are visiting.
Make sure you are well versed in your company’s expense reimbursement policies before making your travel arrangements. This may include things like all expenses must be charged on a company credit card, or a maximum hotel rate for the area of travel, or receiving pre-approval for travel expenses. You don’t want to wait until you boss gets back with out of pocket expenses before realizing that the expenses are unreimbursable.
Probably the hardest part of international travel is figuring out the currency conversions for the expense reports. Some companies have an approved manner for calculating these, so it isn’t an issue. But if your company only requires a prevailing conversion rate for the date of the expense, then you’ll need a way to find those conversion rates. I’ve used XE Currency Exchange for years, and they now have a handy expense calculator tool to make things even easier. Ideally, you’ll be able to submit credit card expenses immediately and get reimbursement before the credit card payment is due, to limit how much actual out of pocket expense your boss needs to front for this trip.
Once last thing to remember for international travel. All electronic devices are liable for search and seizure when entering the United States, even if the traveler is an American citizen. This includes, laptops, USB drives, I-Pods and other music players, and cell phones. If your boss has proprietary information on his laptop, he might want to consider whether or not he wants to carry it with him on an international trip. If he needs to carry the laptop for communication, then he might want to back up proprietary information to disk and delete it from his laptop for the trip. Remember, the government can seize any electronics for any reason, and it may not be returned immediately and all information will certainly be copied.

So, what about my other readers out there. Do you have any advice to give on international travel? What are the pitfalls you’ve run into?Similar Posts:

Travel Arrangements to Wow Any Boss, Part Three: International Travel

Jodith — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:26:42 +0000

While international travel requires all the same steps as domestic travel, it holds some unique pitfalls of which the administrative assistant should be aware.

Time zone issues, specifically date issues. It is not unusual when traveling to another continent that you will leave on one date and arrive on another date. Don’t make the mistake of one assistant I knew that got her boss to China one day too late to make the key note address he was scheduled to give. When making international travel arrangements, always search for flights based on arrival date, not departure, to be sure you boss arrives on time for whatever meetings she will be attending.
Jet lag is a serious problem when crossing multiple time zones. It helps, when possible, to build a little bit of recovery time into the travel schedule on both ends of the trip to help your boss equalize to the local time.
Passports and Visas. Your boss will require a passport when traveling internationally. In your store of data about your boss, always keep things like expiration dates of various documents including his passport. Set yourself a reminder a good 8-9 months in advance of the expiration date to start the renewal process. Some countries will require the passport to be at least 6 months from expiration for travel into their country.Visas are also an issue. As soon as you know your boss is traveling to a foreign country, check to see if they require a Visa to enter the country. The same assistant who sent her boss to China a day late also didn’t look into the Visa process because our company used American Express (cross my heart, it really happened). Luckily our travel agent caught it in time to get the visa before he traveled. Some countries require the visa application to be submitted more than 30 days prior to the travel.

Climate is an issue if your boss is flying down under (or up over if you are located in the Southern Hemisphere). Remember that when you cross the Equator, seasons are reversed, so if it is summer in Boston, it will be winter in Melbourne. Check the internet for weather predictions to advise your boss on appropriate clothing to pack.

International travel is where it pays to have a really good travel agent familiar with international travel. They will often have a service that will walk passport and visa applications through the process (for a fee, of course), will be conversant in the visa requirements, and can help you navigate the minefield of international travel. In the long run, you are better off just paying the extra money to get a travel agents assistance, especially if you are going to a country outside of North America and Western Europe.Similar Posts:

Travel Arrangements to Wow Any Boss, Part Two: The Itinerary

Jodith — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:06:00 +0000

Think about the last time you were traveling, how many pieces of paper you had to keep up with: ticket, boarding pass, hotel confirmation, rental car confirmation, upgrade confirmation. Wouldn’t it be great to have all those things on one sheet of paper? That’s where making a great travel itinerary comes in!

I got this idea because my boss at the time traveled extensively. I wanted to simplify finding the various information for his travel, as well as make it easy for his wife to find him while he was traveling. Once I had all the travel arrangements made for his trip, I would type everything up in an easy to read format. I have uploaded a sample Travel Itinerary for your perusal/use. Note that this one is made up. None of the flight numbers, times, hotel information is real.
Some tips for the itinerary:

Notice that each date heading is bolded to make the current day’s itinerary easy to find. This is especially important for multi-leg trips. I’ve created intineraries that hit 6 countries in less than two weeks. Unfortunately, that one was lost to a harddrive crash so I can’t share it with you here.
Be sure to include the name of the airport since many larger cities have more than one. You don’t want your boss showing up at the wrong airport because you forgot to tell her that this one time she’s flying out of the other one.
Make sure to include driving directions. I personally prefer Yahoo Maps for driving directions, but many swear by MapQuest as well. I type out the driving directions on the itinerary itself and print just the driving map from Yahoo Maps as a backup. Less paper to shuffle that way.
Be sure to include hotel contact numbers and print out a copy of the itinerary for the boss’s spouse/partner. If you have the spouse’s e-mail, send it directly to him/her in case the boss forgets to take it home (which you know is going to happen).
As an added service, call the hotel to check on good restaurants close by that your boss may enjoy. Include that information on the itinerary. If she’s flying in late, check specifically on restaurants that are open when she arrives in case she wants a meal before going to the hotel.
Don’t forget, if your boss is arriving late, be sure and let the hotel know it will be a late arrival or he may arrive to find his hotel room has been given away!
Include information about any special items the boss wants in a hotel: broadband connection, gym hours, that sort of thing. Never assume something will be available. Always ask when you make the travel arrangements.

I never thought much about the itineraries I produced for my much traveling boss (he was VP of Worldwide Support for a big, multinational software company), until other assistants in the company started calling me asking for the template. Their bosses had seen the itineraries I’d put together for my boss and were asking their assistants why they didn’t do the same thing!

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Travel Arrangements to Wow any Boss, Part One

Jodith — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:39:04 +0000

When I first started interviewing for Admin Asst positions, I didn’t put travel arrangements on my resume. I mean, any idiot can make travel arrangements, can’t they? But then on every interview, I was asked about my ability to handle travel arrangements. I finally figured out that there is an art to keeping the boss happy when he’s traveling. This will be the first of 3 posts on making travel arrangements to keep any boss happy. In this post, I’ll talk about the general information you need when making travel arrangements.

First, find out the boss’s preferences. Does she prefer window or aisle? Meal preferences or restrictions? Front of the plane or back? I had one boss who preferred the escape aisle since it generally provided more leg room. These little details are important in keeping your boss comfortable on the flight.
Next is airline preferences. Be sure to get any frequent flier numbers as well as his airline preferences. Find out the status of her frequent flier accounts and when/if she is eligible for upgrades. Set yourself a reminder to call in the minute he is eligible so you can be sure to grab that upgrade.
Time of day is important. Does she prefer to fly in with plenty of time to spare, or does she prefer to arrive at the last minute. This may vary from trip to trip, so always be sure to ask
Let’s not forget hotel preferences. This includes not just which chain but also little things like, does the hotel have a gym (and what hours it’s open), do they have king beds (preferred by the very tall bosses), do they have a mini-bar, is there wi-fi available (or other broadband), is there a restaurant in the hotel, etc
Find out if he has a preferred travel agent. If you work for a big corporation, chances are you’ll either have an in-house travel agency or have ones that are preferred. For a smaller company or non-profit, that may not be the case. And, of course, if money is an issue, you’ll probably want to make the arrangements yourself, since most travel agents charge for services these days. Making the arrangements yourself is the subject of another post.

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For you old hands, this information probably seems pretty basic, but for those new to their administrative assistant position who are making these arrangements for the first time, these tips will hopefully provide a starting place to impress the boss. Feel free to chime in with any information I may have forgotten. If you’re the boss, let us know what you like to have when you travel.

Next post: The Itinerary.Similar Posts: