Last Wednesday, Carla Caccavale Reynolds awoke before dawn, roused her husband and infant daughter and waited for the car that would take her to New York's JFK airport, where she would fly out for an annual meeting in Aruba.
But the Scarsdale, N.Y., resident and partner with a Manhattan-based PR firm was not going on the trip alone. Husband Paul and three-month-old daughter Georgianna Jean were packed and ready too.
Diapers? Check. Breast pump and emergency formula? Check. Notes for the Friday-afternoon meeting? Check.
“I'm just thrilled that Georgianna Jean is coming. If I was travelling on business without her, I think I'd be a basket case right now,” Ms. Caccavale Reynolds said the day before the trip.
She's hardly alone when it comes to bringing family along on business trips. With the rise in single-parent and double-income families, a new generation of employees who simply expect flexibility, and later-in-life parents far enough along in their careers to demand it, workplaces are making it easier to travel with family in tow.
While statistics are more difficult to come by in Canada, a recent U.S. National Business Travel Association survey found that 62 per cent of American business travellers said they add a leisure element to business travel at least once a year. And among those respondents, two-thirds said they take a family member or friend along for the ride.
Embassy Suites, which is set to open a new hotel in Montreal this year, has also done some research: Its survey indicates that a full third of its business travellers with children would take their family on work-related trips if they could.
Of course, many parents who merge business and babies do it out of necessity: Grandma can't babysit the brood overnight because she's off to Florida, and the hubby is already on a business trip himself.
But a growing number of employees are tacking on a couple of extra days on the road and inviting kin for the weekend, says Nora Spinks, president of Work-Life Harmony Enterprises, a work-life consulting firm in Toronto.
“How do you blend your personal life and work life when you travel so many days of the year?” she asked.
It's not hard to see why parents want their family close if a storybook and snuggle before bed are typically hard to come by. Or an evening in with the spouse is a distant memory. For some employees, it's simply going to have to be in a Calgary hotel room with turndown service.
“There's just not enough time in the day to see who you want, especially when you're on the road all the time,” said Karen Banks, director of national sales for Fuzion Consulting in Toronto, a meetings and conference planning service. “People are readjusting their thinking and family is more important now.”
Bonding on the road is one of the reasons Bruce Poon Tip, chief executive officer of G.A.P Adventures, a travel expedition company, routinely visits the company's numerous offices around the world with his wife and two young daughters. In fact, by the time his first child was a year old, she had already been on at least 20 flights across Canada and to Europe, Argentina and Barbados.
“That's my life,” Mr. Poon Tip said. “It was important to me that when I had children my family life would be incorporated into my work.”
But is he able to concentrate on his work, knowing that his toddler might be having a meltdown a couple of doors away? On the contrary, having them in the same city gives him peace of mind, he says. “When I'm away from them I'm constantly trying to cut things short,” he said, admitting he has missed meetings and even hosted one at an airport.
“I've done all kinds of crazy things to get back to them.”
