Opinion: Charity Executives See Different Side of Business Travel

A The New York Times column reports on the vagaries of international travel for relief-agency executives.

Business-travel columnist Joe Sharkey talks to Elizabeth Sheppard, a former frequent-flying corporate executive who now works for Orbis International, about the changes in her travel regimen. Tight, donor-financed travel budgets mean travelers have to make “longer trips with more stops or do whatever else it takes to get to our destinations,” she said.

Noting that corporations are increasingly “running tight ships” with regard to travel, Mr. Sharkey writes that “it is useful to reflect on those other world travelers, the ones who work for charities, for whom a hotel upgrade could be a room with a squat toilet in some poor town in some third world nation that doesn’t even rate its own Lonely Planet guidebook.”

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