Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
Joe and Jen Allen of Allen Safety LLC take their combined 40+ years of worker safety, OSHA, EPA, production, sanitation, and engineering experience in Manufacturing Plants including Harvest Plants/Packers, Case Readies and Further Processing Plants, Food Production Plants, Feed Mills, Grain Elevators, Bakeries, Farms, Feed Lots, and Petro-Chemical and bring you their top methods for identifying risk, preventing injuries, conquering the workload, auditing, managing emergencies and catastrophic events, and working through OSHA citations. They're breaking down real safety opportunities, safety citations, and emergency situations from real locations, and discussing realistic solutions that can actually be implement based on their personal experiences spending 40+ weeks in the field every year since 2001. Joe and Jen are using all of that experience to provide a fresh outlook on worker safety by providing honest, (no sponsors here!) and straight forward, easy to understand safety coaching with actionable guidance to move your safety program forward in a way that provides tangible results.
Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
#45: Travel Like A Pro: Travel Hacks Road Warriors Use For A Better Experience (& How to Get Free Travel!)
Introduction:
In this podcast episode, Jen shares valuable insights and tips on optimizing business travel experiences, emphasizing the importance of smooth stays and how to leverage exclusive perks. With a focus on hotels, flights, and rental cars, Jen provides practical advice on choosing accommodations, navigating flight options, and selecting the right rental car company. Additionally, she delves into the benefits of loyalty programs and corporate discounts, aiming to enhance both the professional and personal aspects of frequent travel.
Podcast Summary:
Hotel Selection and Prioritizing Sleep:
Highlighting the critical role of hotels in determining the success of a trip, especially for those working odd hours.
Encourages listeners to pay attention to factors like noise, temperature control, and renovation status before booking.
Stresses the importance of identifying and sticking to preferred hotel chains for loyalty benefits.
Choosing the Right Hotel Location:
Recommends assessing the distance to work locations and potential inconveniences, such as construction or renovations.
Advises considering travel goals, like seeing operations on different shifts, and tailoring the hotel choice accordingly.
Corporate Discounts and Loyalty Memberships:
Suggests exploring corporate discounts offered by hotel chains and organizations like AAA.
Advocates becoming a loyalty member to accumulate points and enjoy additional perks, including credit card benefits.
Efficient Flight Planning:
Emphasizes the significance of non-stop flights to eliminate layovers and reduce the risk of delays or cancellations.
Discusses factors influencing the decision to drive or fly, considering distance, drive time, and overall efficiency.
Selecting Preferred Airlines:
Recommends identifying main carriers based on home airport connections and personal preferences.
Highlights the advantages of sticking with a few airlines, such as earning status, reduced chances of getting bumped, and access to lounges.
Rental Car Considerations:
Differentiates between reserving a specific car and having flexibility to choose from available options.
Discusses the importance of selecting the right car based on traffic conditions and personal comfort.
Maximizing Travel Perks:
Explores the benefits of accumulating points from hotel stays, rental cars, and flights to enjoy free vacations and companion flights.
Advocates using travel points to bring family members or spouses along, promoting a better work-life balance.
Engaging with Audience and Social Media:
Invites audience questions on travel specifics through direct messages on various social media platforms.
Encourages engagement on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
Conclusion:
Jen wraps up the podcast by expressing gratitude for listeners and encourages them to subscribe, like, and share the content to support the show. She also mentions the upcoming return of co-host Joe in the next episode, promising more valuable insights on worker safety topics.
Note: SEO Keywords - Business travel, travel tips, hotel selection, flight planning, rental car considerations, loyalty programs, corporate discounts, travel perks, work-life balance, worker safety podcast.
Today we are going to be breaking down travel.
Speaker 1:We are working on setting our schedule for the year and so we thought, hey, perfect podcast topic. Because we get asked all the time how do we travel? How do we avoid all the chaos? It's always so dramatic. So this week we're breaking down all of our tips on how to have a smooth travel experience and how to get some of those awesome little perks to stay places for free and get some benefit for friends and family when you're not traveling for work. So here we go, let's dive in.
Speaker 1:["dive In"]. All right, everybody. So I am Jen. You'll notice that I am down a host. Joe is actually in the field traveling, so he's not going to be with us. He'll be with us next podcast, but it's just solo, just me, this week. So sorry that's a bummer for you, but he'll be back next week, so never fear, no worries. So we're just going to dive right in.
Speaker 1:The first thing that I think can change or make or break your stay at a location, whether it be for work or for personal, is hotels. So if you can't sleep, your bed is terrible, it's super noisy, really loud, it's really cold, the temperature of thermostat isn't working right, or maybe you're next to train tracks and the windows are really thin or something. All of those things can go and just really make it impossible to sleep, make it a miserable stay, a bad experience, and so hotels, to me, are one of the most critical pieces of the puzzle for your stay. So if you are working and you're working weird hours or it's really critical that you have a good night's sleep so you can be focused and really on your A game while you're at the location, you're really going to want to pay extra attention to the hotel piece. So I hear a lot of times I think probably the biggest mistake folks make when they're booking their travel is they want to get the hotel that's closest to the location and the cheapest price, and that is sometimes okay, but sometimes that's sometimes you get what you pay for. So one of the biggest tips and pieces of advice that I can probably give whether it be hotels, cars or flights or anything like that, just to start off with first is find and identify.
Speaker 1:If you're going to be traveling all the time and you find yourself that you're on the road quite a bit, I would recommend in my team. This is what my team does as well, as what we've done for years and years and years, is identify a couple of different hotel chains, a couple of different rental car companies and a couple of different airlines, and I would encourage you to stay with those if you can. The reason for that is is you'll want to go ahead and become a loyal team member of that particular chain. It'll allow you to earn points If you have the ability to put expenses and things like that on a personal card and you look at getting a credit card for that particular airline, for an airline card or a hotel chain, and if this is something you want to do, you feel like financially you're able to do this, it makes good sense for you, and your company supports that and is comfortable with that. That's something that we do. To actually create a multiplier on just the stay points, or the airline miles or the rental car points, is that you actually get sometimes three times the points, five times the points for putting a stay or booking an airline on their specific card, and so that can also help you. So the biggest thing, though, is kind of narrow down who flies in and out of your home airport and what airlines have the most nonstop things like that and then really kind of figure out who makes sense for each of those categories and try and stick with those the best you can.
Speaker 1:Now, going back to hotels a little bit, one of the biggest things that you'll also want to try and identify is are they doing work at the hotel? Are they? Is it under renovation? Is it under construction? What's going on? They'll usually have some kind of note on the hotel website about that, but you'll want to make note of that. It can be an inconvenience, especially if you're trying to sleep during the day and you're working third shift. So that's something that you'll want to pay attention to. You also want to pay attention to if you're one of those people who you need a good 20, 30, 40 minutes to wake up in the morning. Gather your thoughts, have a warm beverage of your choice before you show up to a location.
Speaker 1:Booking a location that's 30 to 40 minutes away may be beneficial. If you're going to be working overnight and you're going to be working lots of different shifts while you're at the location, because you're trying to see operations on all of the different shifts that you've got employees or the location has employees working, you may want to look at staying somewhere closer, because sleep may be the top priority and so when you're booking your hotel, you want to kind of just kind of pay attention to what is your goal for the trip, is it? I want to see things on all shifts. Therefore, I really have to be careful about my sleep schedule because I'm going to be changing that quite a bit during the week and so it's going to be really top priority to make sure that I can get to bed and take naps and some things like that to help me switch shifts back forth between third and first and second.
Speaker 1:You may not want to go for a long, long drive in the morning, especially if you're tired late at night, things like that. It's deer season and you're in a rural area that's got lots of deer. That's not always a great scenario either. So just kind of really identify what are the risks that you could be facing if you have a long drive, tired, late at night, dark rural roads, animals, things like that, versus it's daylight. You're going to have daytime driving to work, from work. It allows you to have some of that decompression time in the afternoon or in the evenings to really kind of leave work at work or if your company allows you, sometimes that's a really great time to do debrief calls with some of your other team members, some of your other staff.
Speaker 1:So that could be key too is what is your time worth in terms of that drive back and forth? Is that going to be helpful for you? Is it going to be just kind of a waste of time? For you? It's not beneficial in any way to decompress or wake up or do calls, or you can't do calls, that's not allowed the hands free calls, and so just kind of really figuring out what works best for you. But those are kind of the pro cons of what we say. Me personally, I love a 45 minute drive. I love that wake up time, getting my schedule ready for the day, and I also love that decompression time of just going over the opportunities and where I'd like to focus and where it's best for me to spend my energy the next day. I really like that time to kind of sort that out and that still allows me to have my evening and work on balance safety things, for instance for the business.
Speaker 1:In terms of cost, one of the big things that you also want to look for is does your company have any corporate discounts, so did they have any agreements with any of the particular chains? If they don't and you find yourself traveling a lot sometimes an organization like AAA can be hugely beneficial, especially if you have a concern that you're going to be doing lots of driving and the roadside assistance piece could be very beneficial. Groups like AAA have lots of hotel discounts as well that they offer, so something like that may be a good fit as well for you that you might want to check in. And then again there are also discounts for being a loyalty member, so there's some benefit on the cost saving side as well.
Speaker 1:The biggest thing that we look for in flights, honestly, is a nonstop. A nonstop allows me to eliminate that layover time. Eliminate missing a connection if my first flight's late. Eliminate losing a bag potentially. My first thing that I want to do even if I'm loyal to say, two carriers or I have, actually we have three that we typically try and stay within. I have a top two and then a third if I have to is I will blow all of that to have a nonstop somewhere. So forget it all. If somebody else that's not one of my top three carriers has a nonstop, I'm still taking that nonstop. First because my whole goal when I'm traveling is to eliminate drama. I don't want to have a canceled flight or a delayed flight and now I can't make my connection or I've got this long layover. It just drags out the day. So if I can get a nonstop I am all for that first.
Speaker 1:The next piece is also evaluating based on how far away it is you're going. Is it better to drive? No, this is just us. Don't come for me. This is just where we have to travel and where the airports are based on, where our client sites are and then where we're flying in and out of. We have kind of evaluated that anything within eight hours because we're having to usually drive on the back half of that to get to our client after we get to the airport. So we have to get to the airport, get a bag, get a car and still drive a little bit. A lot of times it's easier for us to just drive it if it's eight hours or under. Absolutely easier to just drive it if it's six hours and under. For us where we're going.
Speaker 1:In relation to airports, that may not always be the case. If you live in a town with an airport that's a major airport, you can get a nonstop and you're going to another town that's got an airport and you're not driving. On either side of that, it may be faster to just do airline travel. It really all just depends on what kind of drive time you have. Going to your home airport, we'll call it, and then, on the back end of that, to get to whatever your destination is.
Speaker 1:So for us, most of the time, though, anything over eight hours, we try and fly, and the biggest reason why we really try and encourage our team to do that is because we start looking at how many days is this taking, how many hours is it safe to drive in one day? And now, if I'm having more days on the road just traveling to get there, what does that look like from a cost standpoint? Because are they able to do a call or not do a call? What are they accomplishing in terms of a work product? They're gone from home but they're not billing out, and they're not able to do a work product, but they're not off, work and home and enjoying time with their family. So that second day becomes kind of weird. So we really try and encourage our employees.
Speaker 1:Anything over eight hours, we start looking at having to add a second day of travel on, and that's what I always want to try and avoid. So our biggest thing is what's your time worth? Time with your family, time at home, time to make sure that all the things that we all have to take care of we all have to get haircuts and have doctor and dental appointments and all those things and if you start having too many days on the road, you're not able to kind of take care of the things you need to at home to feel settled and ready to go and provide a great product to the location that you're working with and you're also not spending time with the family and you're also not benefiting the business because you're just in the car. So that's our biggest thing is what is your time worth and what are you able to accomplish? For me personally, especially because we own the business, I like airline travel because I can work on the plane and I'm not worried about driving. I don't do well working in the car with somebody else driving. It makes me cursive. So I am a big proponent of anything for sure, over seven and a half eight hours, I am absolutely taking a flight. I am not driving because I want to make sure that I'm able to turn those work products around as fast as possible, get them off my plate, because then when I'm home, I'm home and I'm not worried about doing work in the evenings and stuff instead of spending time with the family and the kiddos. So that's a big thing for us.
Speaker 1:In terms of flights, again, if you can stay with a couple of main carriers, that's going to usually be dependent on who's going to offer the most nonstop set of the airport that you're flying in and out of your home airport the most. So if you're flying in and out of a regional one, that may be tough. So it's really going to depend on where you're going and what hubs do you want to avoid or make sure you go through. If you have a choice and just who has the best experience in your opinion, for what you're looking for for an experience, it could be cost related, it could be how plush the travel is when you're actually on the airplane. It could be how fast your crew miles. But if you can stick with a couple of different main carriers, you'll find that you'll get status. You'll find that you get bumped less often. You'll find that it's easier to change and book and cancel flights and rebook them. You get a different customer service line. If you get to a certain tier, your bags may be last on the plane to their first off type of a thing, so you're not waiting so long at bag.
Speaker 1:Claim is some of the different benefits that some of the different companies offer. So you kind of want to look at some of those things and figure out what's the best fit for you. You also may get a benefit if you get a certain loyalty status for different lounges, which can be really, really important if you have cancellations or layovers. So if you find yourself ahead of like cancellation and now I've got six hours before I can get on the next plane or something crazy it's really nice to be able to just go to one of the company's lounges and just have quiet place to work, a place to do calls. That's not so noisy, not so chaotic, a little bit more relaxed. Some of them have food, some of the food is free, they have separate bathrooms and all. So I mean it's really cool experience. If you're already having a bad day, that can be helpful. And again when you're looking at reducing drama if you can get in touch with customer service if you're having some kind of problem with your flight and you have a dedicated service line. That can be hugely helpful too from the business travel side.
Speaker 1:Rental cars there's one big standout difference to me. You have reserve a specific car or you have, with some of the companies, the ability to walk out and select whatever's on the lot within a certain row or something, and so it's really going to be dependent on if you really want to make sure that you're reserving a specific car or if you're more comfortable winging it. This could be more important when you're doing things like traveling in the wintertime and you want to guarantee a four-wheel drive because you are in a snowy region Don't mind my dog, so sorry. You are wanting to make sure that you've got a larger vehicle for a specific reason. Maybe you've got lots of equipment or gear or bag and it won't fit in a small car. You want to guarantee a certain size of car Depending on your traffic situation.
Speaker 1:I personally like different cars. When I know that there's going to be lots and lots of heavy bumper to bumper traffic and some kind of crazier driving going on, I pick a different car, as opposed to when I know I'm going to be on rural back roads. So all of those things may be a contributing factor to how you decide what rental car company that you kind of want to stick with. But again, if you can stick with one or two, I would encourage you to do that because then you get those loyalty points built up. So the name of the game if your company allows you to do this which hopefully they do, because it's a really awesome perk if they do is if you can keep the different points that you accrue for free flights.
Speaker 1:And I know with some of the specific carriers they offer the ability to have a companion fly with you for free. So you get either a certificate for a free flight with them or on some of the carriers is actually good for a year. So if you're on a free flight you can book it for any flight. If you book it far enough in advance and there's open seats, you can start occurring those hotel points. You can have a free car for a certain number of days, free rental car days. You get free flights and you have points maybe to fly some family or a friend with you and then you get a free hotel stay and that can be a free vacation to anywhere that those hotel chains and rental car companies and airlines fly, and that is a huge benefit. That can be so much fun and allow you to see some really cool places in your personal time that you wouldn't normally get to see. So it's a great benefit, if you are traveling a lot, that you get to also have that and sometimes take the family with you, including if your company allows you to take spouses. Our company allows that, so if they have some free time, they use some of their travel points to bring spouses or their children with them while they're on the road. So that's a really great perk. If your company allows you to do that and bring a spouse, then you can bring them with and have dinners with them and see them in the evenings, and that can be really really nice if you find yourself on the road all the time and kind of a road worrier like we are. So hopefully this helped you kind of structure out how you wanna set up your travel for the year.
Speaker 1:If you guys have any questions on travel specifics, you can send us a direct message on any of our socials. We're on Facebook, instagram, tiktok. I think we're on X. Otherwise, you can connect with us directly, joe and I, directly on LinkedIn. We both have individual pages there Joe Allen, jen Allen and you can connect with us there. We've got a company LinkedIn as well where you can follow us on all those different things. We post different stuff on different pages, several different topics, just things that are interesting, kind of making you go. That's different. So you can always connect with us there as well and, as always, if you guys have any specific topics you wanna hear us cover this year, go ahead and send us a direct message about that. And if this page helps you, please subscribe and share and like, because that obviously we all know the algorithm and it does help us. So if you find this helpful and if you like our page, please let us know and like, subscribe and share, because it really does help.
Speaker 1:All right, guys, that's gonna be it for me today. I hope you have an incredible week. Joe will be back with us next time and we'll have some great content to share of that. We can't wait to see you next time. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to Safe, efficient, profitable a Worker Safety Podcast. If you're looking for more in-depth discussions or step-by-step solutions on all of the different safety and regulatory topics. Please visit us at wwwallonsafetycoachingcom for web-based virtual coaching and training, or at wwwallondashsafetycom to book our team for on-site services, training sessions, to order merchandise, to learn more about our team and what services we provide in the field, or just simply to request a topic for us to cover on our next podcast. If you found today's podcast helpful and would like to support our podcast further, please help us by subscribing, liking and sharing this podcast with anyone that could benefit from the information we cover here, as that helps us to continue to put out this free content. Thank you so much for your support.
