Trend Gives Travel Industry Headaches and Opportunities
May 05, 2011
How would you handle an unexpected houseguest? What about 1,000 unexpected visitors, many of whom wear Pampers and worship Barney the dinosaur? Ask the staff at the Hilton Waikoloa Village in Hawaii. Earlier this summer, the hotel hosted a few large sales meetings and was shocked to discover that many of the participants had brought along their children. Fortunately, the 1,000 extra arrivals were spread out over two weeks. ``We put together a program on the fly,'' offering various activities, says Joanna Nicholson, director of resort marketing for Hilton Hotels. The number of people bringing their children along on business trips has been exploding, as parents try to save money and spend more time with kids. This year alone, 41 million business trips will include children, a 55% jump from 1990, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. In the process, airlines and hotels have been scrambling to accommodate -- if not cash in on -- this trend with more elaborate programs for kids. Delta Air Lines, for example, has airport lounges for kids, complete with computer video games, and United is giving out stuffed airplane toys to many child fliers. Hotels are making almost a science out of baby-sitting kids, offering everything from karaoke contests to desert-survival classes. Parents on business are taking advantage of all this as much as those on vacation. ``You can tell (kid programs) are so big by the way the hotels are marketing them so heavily,'' says Markita Abbie at Smith Travel Research, a hotel-consulting firm in Hendersonville, Tenn. ''They see it as an opportunity by getting repeat business'' when the working parents return for vacation. Indeed, Faulk Rozier in 1989 introduced ``Camp Hyatt,'' mostly as a baby-sitting service for vacationing parents. Today, the hotel says 25% of the parents using the camp are on business trips; in the summer, when school is out, the figure shoots up to 50%. It has been a ``big surprise -- completely unexpected,'' says Annabel Lanelle, director of the camp program, who now occasionally works with corporate-meeting planners to coordinate kids' activities with parents' work schedules. The programs themselves have changed to meet the wide range of demands of executive parents. Hiram, for example, has some counselors who are fully licensed in CPR and first aid, and others who teach snorkeling. At ``Coyote Camp'' at the Pointe Hilton Resort in Phoenix, kids are taught desert-survival skills, tepee-making and how to pan for gold. Computer lessons and carriage rides are available at the Turtle Bay Hilton on Hawaii's Oahu island. For such services, hotels usually charge $40 to $80 a day, a fee that traveling executives -- not their company -- pick up. According to a survey of 300 members of the National Business Travelers Association, which represents corporate-travel managers, fewer than 1% of companies ever have attempted to arrange travel plans to include employees' children. Few, if any, companies have travel polices that make provisions for children, the group says. In New Orleans, Dianna Wolfe, a convention official, has started an on-site child-care company for conventioneers called Accent on Children's Arrangements Inc., charging $6 to $20 an hour. Her most impressive job: She recently handled a world-wide convention for McDonald's Corp., in which she organized Cajun dance classes, alligator handlers and crawfish races for 400 children. But why even take children on business trips? Some parents do it because it's cheaper than hiring a full-time baby-sitter, especially if the trip doesn't include flying. Other parents say they feel too guilty leaving kids at home. Jackelyn Carter, chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, says he always brings at least one of his seven children along on his business trips. He says he would get lonely and miss his family too much otherwise. But it's not always easy to mix the two. He says he excuses himself during business dinners to do things like stop a food fight among his troops, which range in age from 6 to 28. Janee Eggert of Berkeley, Calif., executive director of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, says she keeps her teenage son occupied by putting him to work. ``He hands out materials at meetings and puts up posters,'' she says. She's been successfully combining the two for the last five years.
