Business travel isn’t quite the perk it is cracked up to be. For one thing, you have no say about where you go or when (New Yorkers are rude about London weather, but their own city is uninhabitable for four months of the year). Even when the weather is perfect, you often have no opportunity to extend your stay, so most of your time is spent in airports and meetings. The taxi from the airport may be the cultural highlight of the whole trip. Nothing has a worse effort-to-reward ratio than staying in a hotel for a single night. And, worst of all, while you are awake at 3 a.m. watching BBC News 24 repeat itself, your colleagues assume you are lying in a hammock being brought pina coladas.
As a holiday destination for Brits, Texas comes far behind Florida and California, but we feel
at home there
But I have been lucky in one way: not so much because I have been to a few exotic places for free, but because of the places I discovered which I might never have visited at my own expense. Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Gothenburg, Helsinki and Bern come to mind. None of these is obscure – I’m not one of those people who wants to live among Amazonian tribesmen; I like a bit of room service. But they are all stunning places which sit below that threshold where the volume of tourism is so high that it is impossible to see how the locals lead their everyday lives, or where everything is so prepackaged that you can’t make a surprise discovery.
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