7 Common Business Traveling Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Every year, around 463 million business trips are taken inside of the US alone. Think of how many that means across the world!

Business trips are incredibly common, but even those who undertake them a lot still make mistakes that make the trip harder on them. 

If you want to have a smooth-sailing journey, avoid these common business traveling mistakes. 

1. Failing to Account for Delays

When traveling for work, you shouldn’t book everything close together if it’s possible to avoid it.

For example, you might anticipate your plan landing at one pm, calculate that it takes an hour to get to your meeting place, and have a meeting scheduled to start at two pm. 

What happens if your plane is delayed even slightly? What happens if the cab line is absurdly long and you’re forced to wait?

Allow yourself a little breathing room and try to account for some delays. That means you can relax and not feel rushed. 

2. Not Booking Ground Transportation

Although you might have your flight booked and ready to go, you could completely forget about ground transportation.

Sure, you can call an Uber when you get to your destination — however, the rideshare point is often hard to find, and there may be surge charges. Your location may not even have Uber, depending on where you’re flying to.

Prebooking ground transportation is always the best option. There are many methods of transportation, but you should at least research what’s available before you hit your destination. 

3. Isolated Accommodation

If you’re meeting a lot of coworkers or people from the same industry you intend to network with, the last thing you want to do is be stuck in a hotel many miles from where they’re staying. That’s a lot of back-and-forth car trips to get to know them, and the expenses can rack up to!

Make sure you’re staying close to where you need to be. Many places even offer corporate apartments, where everyone can stay in the same building. This is sure to make the productivity of the trip much higher. 

4. Not Staying in Touch

When traveling for work, you should also make sure you stay in touch with the people you’re working with.

If you experience delays or someone else does, or an accident happens, you need to be in the loop — as does everyone else!

Don’t expect to be able to meet up with people at the pre-arranged time with no hiccups. Take down each other’s contact information. You should always hope for the best but expect the worst!

5. Not Checking Visa Requirements

Are you traveling to an entirely different country for work? You should make sure to check out the visa requirements.

Too often, people arrive at passport control in the international line with no idea that they needed a visa to enter the country. For example, in the USA itself, you can’t use a tourist visa to come and work here — you’d need a special work visa for that. Many other countries have the same practices.

Don’t just assume you can show up and be let in. Your whole trip might be ruined, and it could be a long way back to your own country! 

It’s easy to research visa requirements online and make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. 

6. Not Paying Attention to Local Customs

In the same vein, you should ensure you know everything you need to know about the local customs. This is because the country you’re traveling to might have very different traditions than yours, and things might be considered offensive there that aren’t in your own country.

It’s generally very easy to do some online research and look for the common mistakes people make in each country. If you’re traveling between Canada and the USA, you likely don’t have to worry about this — but if you’re going further across the world, chances are, the culture is going to be very different and you should be prepared for that. 

7. Last-Minute Planning

If there’s one mistake to avoid on a business trip, it’s last-minute planning.

Sometimes this can’t be helped. Sometimes there’s an urgent call where you have to travel for work and don’t have much time to preplan.

However, a lot of the time, you can plan in advance and you’ll thank yourself for it!

There are a lot of reasons to do this. Flights and hotels get more expensive as the time of travel comes closer, so you might end up going over your business travel budget.

You might not be able to purchase a non-stop flight or get the hotel you wanted. This is particularly common in peak times, where things will sell out entirely.

Overall, it’s better to have things prepared in advance. You can always make changes to the arrangements if you need to. 

Don’t forget to collect those business travel rewards on your credit card when booking too! Booking in advance means you can pick the best option for that. 

Avoid These Business Traveling Mistakes

Although so many work trips are undertaken by travelers every year, these business traveling mistakes happen often. People forget to book things in advance, don’t consider ground transportation, or forget to check the entry requirements of the far-off country they’re going to.

By bearing them all in mind, you can ensure you aren’t caught off-guard and end up on a stressful business trip.

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