What do business travelers want?

In the movie What Women Want, road warrior-turned-heartthrob Mel Gibson plays a sexist executive who can secretly hear what women think. In real life, the engineers and marketing executives responsible for our technology are clueless nerds who think they know what road warriors want.

It would be nice if they actually did.

Maybe then there wouldn’t be as many myths about what business travelers need from their technology. And maybe then you wouldn’t need someone like me to shine a spotlight on the industry’s shortcomings. I’m not holding my breath – and if you’re a frequent traveler, neither are you – but until someone pays attention, let’s review the three most outrageous misconceptions and what they mean to us:

Myth #1: We can’t get enough wireless technology. Give us more.

Reality: In fact, most business travelers don’t give a damn about wireless gadgets – with one exception. Don’t even try to separate a road warrior from his cell phone. Not in an airport, not in a plane, not in a hotel, not on a train. (Sorry, Dr. Seuss.) As I’ve warned in column after column, the most recent of which contained blistering attacks from road warriors who thought I had advocated taking away their talking toys, you do not ever mess with the mobile phones.

So what’s driving the wireless “revolution”? Part of it is the work of overzealous analysts who write insanely optimistic white papers and reports about the wireless industry. They do this not only in order to attract more customers – after all, good news sells reports – but also to keep their own jobs. Technology developers, eager for the next big thing, then hop on to the proverbial bandwagon after throwing together a couple of ceremonial focus groups to satisfy the suits with corner offices. Never mind evidence to the contrary, like a recent A.T. Kearney study that claims only 12 percent of mobile users intend to shop wirelessly, less than half of those who said they would do so a year ago. No one is listening.

What this means to you: So the industry is trying to shove technology down your throat that you don’t want. So what else is new? In a situation like this, where you’re probably being issued gadgets that you neither want nor will work on the road, your best bet is to pound away at the character making the purchasing decisions. You can’t change the whole industry, but you can keep your company from becoming another senseless statistic.

Myth #2: There aren’t enough high-speed Internet connections. If you don’t install them, we’ll refuse to stay in your hotel.

Reality: Give us a reasonably priced room with an old-fashioned copper wire leading up to an RJ-11 jack and we’ll be fine, thanks. A reporter recently asked me what I thought of Hyatt Hotel’s announcement that it would outfit the meeting rooms in its 120 properties with a “minimum” of a T1 line speed, upgradeable to a blistering-fast T3 “as needed.” Real nice, I said, but in all my years of writing this column, I’ve never heard from a business traveler who was disappointed by a phone line’s limited bandwidth. Rather, they’ve complained loudly about surcharges placed on Internet connections, about the difficulty of tapping into a hotel’s fancy Virtual Private Network or Local Area Network.

That’s not to say I’m opposed to the installation of these high-speed connections. I welcome them. But I think it’s important to be honest about who’s demanding the T1s and T3s in the hotel. It’s not us – it’s some guy in the marketing department who thinks we’ll fall all over ourselves to book his hotel if there are RJ-45 sockets in every wall. We won’t.

What this means to you: Take advantage of the free connection time while it’s still a buyer’s market for bandwidth. Oh yeah, and don’t forget to bring a line tester, because in today’s hotels, you never know what you’re plugging your laptop into.

Myth #3: Lighter is better. When in doubt, throw it out.

Reality: Even though we gripe about heavy laptop computers, we tend to become even more irritated if a PC manufacturer strips away important components – like disk drives – in an effort to lighten our load. What are they thinking? Should we just store everything on the hard drive and hope for the best? Part of the problem may be that the engineers who come up with these ideas are used to that ubiquitous server connection and are completely unaware of the needs of mobile users.

There are signs that that manufacturers are slowly coming around to the “lighter isn’t necessarily better” way of thinking. NEC Computers’ new Versa Txi ultraportable, for example, is available with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, so you don’t have to constantly switch the drives out. Unfortunately, the 1.44 MB floppy disk drive is an external device, so even though the whole PC weighs only about four pounds, you’ll probably also find yourself fumbling around with a lot of wires, plugs and peripherals in order to get the computer to do what you want. When subnotebooks go on a starvation diet in order to meet some arbitrary weight-loss requirement, the net effect is more work for us. (And more wires and add-ons to lose on the road.)

What this means to you: Well, you already know that lighter isn’t always better, but read the PC specs before you place your next order. Make sure the manufacturer hasn’t decided to detach the motherboard and make it an optional accessory in order to reduce the computer’s weight.

How about you? What do you want in technology? How are your technology needs misunderstood – and what could manufacturers and travel suppliers do to improve their hardware, software and bandwidth offerings? E-mail me at chris@elliott.org and share your thoughts. Please include your name, city and occupation. Your comments may be used in a future column.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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