Alternatives to flying for business travel

Making personal connections is integral to business success, it can be argued, but does this necessarily require multiple days lost to travelling, when you can make an equally strong connection via video conferencing on Skype or something similar?

It's certainly a position that many companies are taking, but business travel has become so ingrained in the culture that it's hard to imagine doing it another way. A recent study by Concur revealed that a whopping 98 per cent of surveyed sales executives believe that face-to-face contact is still essential, and 86 per cent maintained that more business trips would make them "significantly better" at their jobs.

If business travel is really still as necessary as companies believe, then cutting the frequency of air travel could potentially help reduce costs and halt some of the damage we're doing to the world. Greener alternatives are out there, it's just a matter of finding them, and it might be worth checking out your options before your next business trip.