We’re sharing tips to take that trip your company is paying for and use it as an opportunity to explore more of a new destination, enjoy experiences you might not pay for if you were going on your own, maximize points for your personal travel, and make the most out of the hotel your company is paying for.

Our best tips for turning a work trip into a mini vacation:

• Use a work trip as an opportunity to experience a new destination or see another side of it 
• Get points and status with airlines and hotels by booking yourself and submitting for reimbursement 
• If you can fly early and fly out later you can give yourself more time do things. 
• If the trip is closer to beginning or end of week you can add on the weekend. Or add on a PTO day or a few.
• Weekdays often have lower prices on drinks, meals & tickets so if your work trip is during the week you could get your company to cover more within you spend. 
• Take even just an hour or two to do some of the iconic experiences in the destination
• Use it as an opportunity to dine in cool/good places. Don’t always fall back on dining at the hotel. 
• Do patron the hotel bar and talk to fellow travelers and/or the bar tender
• Use the hotel amenities
• Splurge on a hotel or flight upgrade you otherwise wouldn’t do if your company wasn’t paying for the base booking

Don’t go yet! Explore our other travel tips and hacks episodes for more inspiration!

Maximize a Work Trip for Pleasure – Episode Transcript

0:35

Today you have me, Kim, to share how to make the most out of a work trip.

0:54

Over the last few years, I have gone on a ton of work trips.

I kind of manifested traveling for work and now it’s happening somewhat frequently.

I remember a couple of years ago I kept saying to myself, I really want to travel for work.

I want to that lets me travel and then all of a sudden I started picking up experiential marketing jobs on the side and then my regular PR and marketing day job started having more client in person meetings.

1:22

And I’ve been traveling to some really cool places and some places that aren’t the best.

But I will talk about some of the experiences that I had in some cool places.

Miami, I’ve gone to San Diego, Alabama, San Francisco, and then all over Texas and Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and kind of everywhere in between.

1:40

I like to use a work trip as much as possible as an opportunity to experience a new destination or to see another side of it if you’ve been there before.

A lot of my events that I’ve done have taken me to San Antonio, Dallas and Houston over and over.

So I’m not exactly experiencing a new destination, but I try to do something new when I go there.

2:01

I do a lot of spa activities when I go to Dallas and Houston in particular, because they have a lot of really good spas there.

So if you’re a spa lover like I am, definitely look into spas in the destination.

It’s not something that you need a ton of time for.

2:18

Depending on the spa, you could spend a couple hours, you could spend a full day there.

That’s always a really good opportunity.

So if you’re not really wanting to like get out and tour the city, you can still have some relaxation and enjoy a nice spa experience in another city.

I like to look at work trips, not as like I have to travel for work and I have to be away from home.

2:38

It’s actually a positive.

You get to experience this new destination, get to do some fun new stuff, but you also get to rack up points and status with airlines and hotels when you book yourself and then you submit for reimbursement.

I absolutely love when the company asks me to book it myself because I’m like cha Chang.

2:58

Those points are mine baby.

And then a little hack for some airlines like Southwest and some others, if you book and the price goes down, you can rebook.

This is with hotels and car rentals too.

So if you book, you submit your expense reimbursement for say it was a $500 booking.

3:16

You get paid back, then the price goes down, so you rebook it later down the road before the trip and say your $500 booking goes down to 4.

Well, that other $50.00 is in your account as a credit, and it’s not like you’re getting the money back so you can’t submit it to the company, but you’d now have a credit that you can use for future.

3:35

I don’t know if that’s dishonest, I hope that it’s not, but I view it as a nice little perk of handling your own travel reservations for work.

Now, if you’re going on a work trip, if you can manage to fly in a bit earlier or fly out a bit later, you can give yourself time to do more things.

3:53

So if you need to be at a work meeting at Friday 8:00 AM, rather than trying to take a red eye or fly in first thing in the morning on Friday, maybe come in Thursday.

Come in Thursday around 6:00 PM or come in Thursday even earlier and give yourself the full day of Thursday to do things that can be just instrumental in getting to see a little bit more of a destination.

4:14

Or say that Friday meeting that you have.

Add on some PTO days.

Maybe take Thursday as a PTO day, or you have then your weekend Saturday and Sunday.

If you can stack a work trip somewhat close to a weekend on either side, then you can do a Monday or a Friday off and really extend your trip.

4:32

If you’re going to a cool destination like you’ve never been to San Francisco and you have a work trip there, I would highly consider doing that and just paying the extra for the days that you’re staying, not as part of the work trip.

I do this quite often.

I have a client in Orlando that I go to visit once or twice a year and we typically meet on Fridays.

4:51

My client services Rep who is on this account with me, she’s a big Disney fan.

So I think she does this strategically for us because we typically will plan a trip to one of the Disney parks on Saturday and just stay a couple extra days.

And sometimes your company will even if they give you a Max budget, say you have a budget of $500.00 for hotels, you can sometimes have them pay pay for the hotel through the extracurricular part of your trip as long as it’s within your Max budget.

5:20

Some companies have different rules around they only pay for the night that the work is required.

Either way, kind of really review your works travel policy so that you can get the most out of it and enjoy the destination that you’re going to.

Another great part about work trips is that typically they do happen during the week right?

5:38

That is when business takes place.

And on weekdays, there’s often lower prices on drinks, meals, and tickets.

So if your work trip is during the week, you could leverage your per diem, your expenditures to a greater extent and have your company cover more of it.

5:54

So if you go to happy hour and you get 3 things for your $30 budget, that’s three things.

If you went on the weekend, maybe those three things would have put you at the $50 range.

So you get more for a lesser price and your company’s covering it.

6:09

Really enjoy it.

I would really recommend, even if you just have an hour or two, get out and experience the destination, especially some of the iconic experiences in that destination, even if you have been there.

So Squatty’s, you know, we all grew up in Northern California.

6:25

It was about an hour and a half drive to San Francisco.

I went to San Francisco a million times growing up, but it’s a city.

There’s so much I haven’t done there.

So this year I had a client visit in San Francisco and in between the day meetings and the evening dinner, me and a couple of Co workers decided to go out into the city and do a couple of the iconic experiences.

6:47

We rode the cable car and I’d actually never ridden the cable car in San Francisco so it was so fun.

We went down to Pier 39, we got sourdough bread, we got some of the iconic, famous Irish coffee.

It was so fun and we were back at the hotel for our dinner meet within two hours.

7:04

Last year I had to go to Miami.

I was going to be working really hard all week in Miami and flew in on a Sunday.

I chose to fly in a little bit earlier on the Sunday so I could have that day to go out to the beach before the work week started and I was so glad that I got to do that.

7:20

I spent a few hours at the beach just tanning, relaxing, having fun by myself.

And then during that week it was like 13 hour days so there was no time to do anything during that.

That’s why I recommend give yourself an extra day or a few hours if you can.

I do a lot of jobs out in San Antonio for different events and so I try to do different things or go out to eat in San Antonio when I’m there.

7:42

One of the biggest draws of San Antonio is the River Walk.

It is a really cool experience.

It is not a tourist trap.

Locals and tourists alike will visit there and it is worth it because I do these event jobs and then they end at a decent hour in the evening.

I got to experience the River Walk at night and to see it all lit up and beautiful and bustling and lively with live music and people walking around was a very, very cool experience.

8:07

And all I did was, you know, walked around and got to enjoy it.

Work trips, you should use them as an opportunity to dine in cool places or really good places that you want to go to that you may not have been interested in before.

Do not always fall back on just getting a meal at the hotel restaurant, the hotel bar.

8:24

I have two examples of this that hopefully will inspire you to try this out.

So one day I was doing a event out in Houston.

It was a day event.

So it ended around fourish PM.

It was downtown.

I was walking back to my car after the event and I was hungry.

So I was like, OK, maybe I’ll just order something.

8:41

Maybe I’ll pick something up and then go back to the hotel.

But as I was walking back to my car, I walked past a Morton Steakhouse.

And so I went into Morton’s Steakhouse by myself, like sweaty and just tore up from a full day of working out in the Texas heat.

8:56

I sat at the bar.

I was hoping there’d be some cuties at the bar, but it was kind of cleared out at this time.

That’s OK.

I sat at the bar.

I had the best girl dinner, big glass of delicious red wine, truffle Parmesan fries, and a Caesar salad.

It was absolutely divine.

9:13

I felt like I was treating myself.

And the best part of it was my company was picking up the bill.

And then another time in San Antonio, I was doing a couple of days out there and so I had just finished the event.

It was probably 6 PMI was hungry.

9:29

I wanted to get some Tex Mex.

So I went down to the Riverwalk and I found a really great restaurant.

I got my meal.

I got a giant Margarita and then I was going to go back to my hotel.

So I was walking down the Riverwalk back to get to my car and as I was walking a man looked to me and asked me a question about where something was.

9:48

And I was trying to help him, but I’m not super familiar with San Antonio.

So we get to talking a little bit and him and his friend are there visiting from Kansas.

Well lo and behold, instead of going to my car, end up hanging out with them for a couple of hours, I got another drink and we just hung out for quite a while.

And then once the night was over I kind of headed back to my hotel.

10:06

But it was so fun.

I like made instant friends and got to hang out and be social for a little bit so it was really nice.

You never know what can happen when you just don’t get food and go back to your hotel.

Like go out, get a nice meal, bill your company for it.

That being said, I do recommend that you patron the hotel bar.

10:25

If you’re staying at a hotel that has a decent restaurant and bar and there’s people there, I do highly recommend you go down there.

There’s something about a hotel, especially a hotel with a robe.

You know, I love a hotel robe.

I like to drink a glass of red wine in my robe in my hotel.

10:43

It just caps me off for the night.

I absolutely love the experience.

That alone is something I recommend you do on a work trip.

But sometimes I, every time actually, I go down to the bar to get that glass of wine.

I usually don’t bring my own wine and ask for a glass.

10:58

Only if the hotel doesn’t have a bar will I do that.

But one time in Dallas, they had put me up at a really nice Marriott.

I was like, oh, we’re fancy today.

And I went down to the hotel bar.

I was actually ordering a salad.

So I was waiting there at the bar for my salad.

11:14

I was planning to go back to my room, eat it, drink my glass of wine because I had a spa early morning the next day.

So as I’m sitting there at the bar, there are two girls who are cousins.

They’ve been having this like little escape weekend.

They get to talking to me.

11:29

They invite me to go sit out by the fire pits and hang out with them.

And I’m like in yoga pants and like halfway ready to call it a night.

But I’m like, OK, I mean, why not?

So order a second glass of wine and I go hang out with them.

We just hit it off so well that like they say they’re going out.

11:45

There’s some bars and restaurants and stuff across the way not too far.

So I’m like, F it, I’m going to go out there and I am going to hang out with these girls.

We went out, we had a few drinks, we had a lovely night and you know, they’re still friends.

So when I’m in Dallas, sometimes we hit each other up and that is amazing.

12:01

You never know who you’re going to meet at the hotel bar.

Even if that doesn’t happen, you will talk to the bartender, you will talk to some of the other people that are there.

Sometimes work trips can be a little lonely once the work portion of things is done and you might want to talk to someone.

So hotel bar is where it’s at.

A lot of times two different hotels will have free happy hours.

12:20

If you can make it based on your work trip time, you can get a free glass of wine, a free gin and tonic.

Maybe they’ll have like, I know a lot of Hiltons will do a happy hour where you can get beer, wine for free.

So check out what amenities your hotel offers.

And Speaking of amenities, I love using the hotel gym when it’s a nice one, when you’re staying at a decent hotel that has a pretty cool hotel gym with up to date equipment and weight machines, not just free weights and a treadmill.

12:48

I love using the hotel gym and a lot of times I have it to myself, which is even better to have a private small gym to yourself.

I feel like I have a home gym.

Always, always, always look at pictures on TripAdvisor or Google business profiles.

That’s going to give you the best look at what their gym looks like.

13:04

And if working out is important to you, then try to book yourself a hotel that has a nice gym.

And then if the hotel has other amenities like sauna or hot tub, indulge in it.

Actually use the amenities that it has.

You will not regret it.

I mean, save yourself 30 minutes, 45 minutes to go enjoy a sauna in a hot tub.

13:23

And then the last thing I’ll say about maximizing work trips for pleasure is maybe splurge a little bit on an upgrade that you otherwise wouldn’t do if your company wasn’t paying for the bulk of that bill.

I’ve done this a couple of times.

My work had got me a flight from Austin to Orlando to go visit that client that I love so much.

13:41

And it’s a short flight, it’s like 2 1/2 hours.

But American Airlines had sent a message with the option to upgrade to 1st class, and I’d never flown first class before at this point.

And so I paid, I think it was like 100 bucks to upgrade to 1st class.

13:56

And it’s only a 2 1/2 hour flight.

So sure, I’m gonna do it.

And I did it and I loved it and it was the best experience of my life.

And that is until I finally recently experienced first class international lifeless seats.

Now I’m a changed woman, but the upgrade was cool.

I also upgraded on a recent trip.

14:13

I had a work meeting in San Diego and the company had approved a certain hotel at a certain price point.

And so I booked that hotel.

I submitted for reimbursement.

But the hotel that I really wanted to stay at was the Westgate Hotel in downtown San Diego because they have this amazing rooftop pool that I love to work from.

14:32

And then they have an attached gym called Aquavie that is accessible to hotel guests.

I love that gym.

It’s the most upscale, beautiful multi story gym that hardly anyone is there.

You can join that gym in San Diego as just a member.

By the way, if anyone is listening from San Diego, highly recommend it.

14:49

Anyway, I really wanted to stay at the Westgate hotel so I canceled that previous booking I booked here and then I just covered whatever the difference was myself.

Very very good use of money.

Make your work trip feel like a vacation.

Maximize your work trip for pleasure.

Don’t just take the work, do it and leave.

15:06

Enjoy your life.

Romanticize your life.

And with that, squaddies, thank you so much for tuning into this week’s Just the Tip.

Make sure to subscribe, leave a review and follow us on All the Socials, a Travel Squad podcast, and have some fun traveling on your work trip this weekend.