Excess Baggage Weighs Down British Business Travellers

downloading would prevent overloading, says FT.com

The briefcases of Britain's business travellers may be bulging with high tech tools, but people are also lugging around the same old paper documents, files, diaries and notebooks. According to global business portal FT.com, business travellers are becoming human filing cabinets, typically transporting complete mobile offices, instead of relying on technology.

New FT.com research confirms that mobile phones, laptop computers and electronic organisers may be de rigueur for busy business travellers, but these are being carried as well as - and not instead of - their paper based equivalents. Although a third of businesspeople carry a laptop while travelling, many fail to use the internet to provide safe transfer of work files and confidential information such as diaries.

Of those business travellers who routinely carry a laptop computer, nearly three out of four (72 per cent) also take hard copy files and documents, around a half (55 per cent) take a paper diary, and a similar number (45 per cent) pack a notebook.

The research, conducted by MORI¹ , suggests that such duplication is taking place on a significant scale. Two thirds of these working people (76 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women) now travel on business, spending time away from their usual place of work.

With so much packed into business baggage, travellers face the risk of losing critical or confidential documents. For example, more than one in four respondents (27 per cent) admitted that they, or a colleague, had lost or forgotten work documents when travelling.

Despite recent high profile cases of lost or stolen laptop computers (for example, 52 government laptops were stolen between April 1997 and May 2000³) as many as 35 per cent of computer users do not keep separate copies of confidential and critical business information.²

The solution, as advocated by FT.com, is to use the internet to access an online office, consisting of archived files, diaries and e-mail. The idea appealed to half (49 per cent of respondents), and was particularly attractive to those travellers who use the internet at home (62 per cent liked the idea), and to those who already use it within their work (with 65 per cent in favour).

"With access to personal files available via the internet, there is no reason for business travellers to burden themselves with such excess baggage," says Jonathan Morris, vice president, Personal Office, FT.com. "Business travellers are overloaded unnecessarily with briefcases, laptops and other gadgets as well as paper files and diaries. Our advice is to download what you need when you arrive at your destination."

Online offices, such as FT.com Personal Office (www.ft.com/personaloffice/), enable users to store important files and other work related documents online so that they can be accessed securely via a web browser in or out of the office, anywhere in the world.

1. FT.com MORI poll of 685 full and part-time workers who use a PC at work. Interviews conducted face-to-face in July 2000.
2. Source: Compaq MORI survey of 2,147 people in Great Britain between 4-8th May 2000.
3. As revealed in Hansard Friday 26th May

Other Key Findings:

• The mobile phone is the number one luggage item for the business traveller (79%): More common than a diary (52%), newspaper or book (34%) or briefcase (55%)
• One in ten women actually dread travelling on business because of all the documents they have to carry with them
• Business travellers give business centres and internet cafes the thumbs down. Only 9% say they would use them to make business travel easier
• One in eight say that carrying work documents, computers and mobile phones now leaves little space for personal items in their luggage

About FT.comFT.com (www.ft.com), the web site partner of the Financial Times, is the leading international business portal. FT.com attracts more than 1.2 million unique visitors each month and generates 30 million monthly page views, making it the most-visited commercial news site in the UK and among the world's most significant sources of business news on the internet.