Simon Calder: The Man Whose Business Is Travel

Loan, loan, loan your boat

The travel procurement manager, in Crichton's Annexe, with a powerpoint. It sounds like a dénouement from Cluedo, the board game in which contestants have to guess the culprit, the location and the weapon involved in a gruesome murder. In fact, this is one of dozens of business sessions aboard a floating conference centre that spent a weekend moored off the Isle of Wight.

The travel procurement manager, in Crichton's Annexe, with a powerpoint. It sounds like a dénouement from Cluedo, the board game in which contestants have to guess the culprit, the location and the weapon involved in a gruesome murder. In fact, this is one of dozens of business sessions aboard a floating conference centre that spent a weekend moored off the Isle of Wight.

Twenty dozen corporate travel managers and sales directors were all at sea, in a storm of motivation and moneymaking. Imagine a pirate radio station broadcasting nothing but "Wake up to Money" and you get the picture of the activity below decks.

Where do cruise ships go in those grey, gloomy weeks after the clocks go back but before the Christmas lights switch on? To the Caribbean, many of them. The hurricanes that harry island-hoppers in the West Indies are subsiding, and the Hurricanes (white rum, dark rum, apricot brandy, grenadine) can safely be shaken, not stirred. But some vessels discharge the last of the summer's payload of paying punters and pick up a strange cargo indeed.

MS Oriana departed from the Mayflower terminal in Southampton at 8pm, destination - well, that was of no consequence to the people on board. Imagine boarding a cruise ship only to find that the only passengers were high-powered executives, and that no one could get on or off between Thursday and Sunday. That might sound like the stuff of nightmares, or at least reality TV. But it suits P&O Cruises to rent her out at the fag-end of October, and it suits the 240 besuited delegates to check in for a slow boat to nowhere.

The crucial element of this commercial convergence is that the audience is the very definition of captive: "a distraction-free environment", is how the organiser, Richmond Events, describes it; a recent delegate called it "a gilded cage". The company arranges cruises for every corporate specialism from catering to IT. For travel managers, there is no escape from PowerPoint presentations from business travel experts and one-to-one sessions with everyone from Geraldine Giles, reflexologist, to Jonathan Sumner, vendor of pay-as-you-go mobile phone cards. That, at least, is his analogy for the one-32nd share of a corporate jet that he sells. "You pay upfront for 25 hours of executive aviation in a year." The only difference with a phone card is that the minimum charge for a prepaid plane card from Marquis Jet is $125,000 (£75,000). This works out at nearly £1 per second, an even higher rate than the internet cafe on the 13th floor, sorry, the top deck. Checking e-mails aboard Oriana weighs in at an ambitious £225 per hour.

As prison ships go, a cruise liner is a good place to be a hostage to the fortunes to be made and lost in business travel - even though all the minibars in delegates' cabins were emptied before they checked in. The organisers have converted Crichton's Annexe into a hi-tech seminar room.

Tiffany Court, where holidaymakers usually take tea, is transformed into a business bazaar where every table is devoted to a sponsor such as Business Beyond the Box. Only one or two delegates looked determined to turn this into a booze cruise.

Dinner conversation whizzes between management theory and wizard wheezes for upgrades; one older delegate bemoaned the demise of British Caledonian, an airline with Scottish routes that had given him a company tartan tie - "Just wear this at check-in, sir, and you're guaranteed an upgrade."

"If you don't have a 14-year-old on your board," says someone quoting the management guru Tom Peters, "you'll be out of business in 10 years."

You need to escape from the marketing mélange? Every cabin has a television. But although Spithead is only a spit away, the only satellite channels worth watching are BBC World and CNN.

SO MANY trips, so little time: research conducted for the event shows that one in four executives is travelling less, but two in five are travelling more. Travel budgets have been cut in 97 per cent of cases. And the road, rail and air warriors are not enjoying themselves as much as they might. In the past year, airlines such as BMI have "de-frilled" routes by switching them to low-cost subsidiaries such as Bmibaby at East Midlands. British Airways has ceded some slots at Gatwick to easyJet, and given up on some European routes served by Ryanair. "The days have gone when a full-service airline like British Airways can be all things to all people in all markets, that we can fly to places like Gothenburg and Gdansk," says its CEO, Rod Eddington. "It's a much more competitive game than it was, so we can't afford to do that any more."

BA's boss will be cheered to know that his airline is, by a mile, the most-used supplier in the business of business travel.

Delegates heard from a range of other business leaders whose views had been sounded out for the event. There was a vow of economy from the founders of lastminute.com: "We're always at the back of the plane, in a cost-conscious mode, travelling on the cheapest possible fares," says Martha Lane Fox. "As we travel about two or three times a week, it's really important that we pay attention to the fares we're paying."

Three out of five lucky executives still find themselves stretching out in business class on long-haul flights, where by far the most popular feature of business class is the flat bed. The new business-class products being rolled out by Qantas, Singapore Airlines and Virgin Atlantic are set to leapfrog BA's excellent offering, and leave the competition way behind - not least because business travellers rate their favourite occupation as... going to sleep.

"Collective despair" best describes feelings about Europe's busiest airport: "Heathrow should be knocked down, and a modern user-friendly airport should be erected," was one delegate's view.

"We need another runway at Heathrow rapidly," says Mike Platt, chief executive of the leading agency consortium BTI. "But I think it's almost too late already, and we're going to be squeezed in like sardines in a few years' time. It could affect UK plc as a major hub." The long waits for take-off, landing and baggage are already affecting UK business travellers. You might assume that the most-cited drawback to business travel would be separation from loved ones. No - the greatest frustration is delays.

THE MAJORITY of executives, who describe business travel as a necessary evil rather than a perk of the job, are being too tough on themselves. They should adopt the positive attitude of Britain's most celebrated businesswoman: "I just love airports," says Martha Lane Fox. "Even if it's a day or two-day trip, it's a luxury for me."

Business travellers who do not share Lane Fox's enthusiasm for flying to Frankfurt should get out more and allow travel to perform its greatest trick: broadening the mind of even the hard-bitten traveller.

A sales rep who stayed on for an extra day in Tokyo could be inspired by the theatricality of the tuna auction at the Central Fish Market in the Japanese capital.

A transport manager might spend the day whizzing around Mexico City by bus in a bid to detect the sense of order that underpins the apparent chaos on the capital's public transport network.

Probably more safely, a customer relations executive could spend the afternoon at a café in Paris to see how a French patron handles clients.

Rather like the job of a newspaper travel editor, at least you can pretend to colleagues that you are working.

Richmond Events: 020-8487 2200; www.richmondevents.com