It was 2 p.m. on a recent Thursday outside of one of Pittsburgh's busiest business hotels, and the cabs parked there hadn't had a customer in the last hour and 20 minutes.
Charles Chuckee knew exactly how long it had been because that was how long he had been sitting in his cab waiting for a fare. The guy in the cab in front of him had given up and driven away.
You don't have to tell cab drivers in Pittsburgh that there has been a drop in business travel.
You don't have to tell Mike Vargo, either. Vargo is spokesman for West Mifflin, Pa.-based Corporate Air, which services private jets and leases them when their owners aren't using them. Most of the travelers are salesmen and executives.
A drop in flights has cost some of the people who schedule, clean, maintain and refuel the planes their jobs. They've been the ones hurt, Vargo said, by the demonization of traveling on private jets -- not the CEOs who have been labeled as fat cats.
At most, he said, those executives are inconvenienced, and the companies spend more to send them on commercial flights, if their hourly wages are taken into account.
Two factors are driving down business in the sector. First is the overall state of the economy. As Susan Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, said, "A lot of this is: Business is down, ergo, people travel less."
The other factor affecting business travel is what Gurley calls the "sniff test," or how a meeting would be portrayed if a newspaper reporter walked in and wrote about it. Would it stink in the next day's paper?
That stench covered AIG when, one week after the insurer was bailed out in September, executives went to a resort in California where they included more than $30,000 for spa treatments and greens fees in the $400,000 bill.
To avoid the bad smell, Gurley said, many organizations are choosing to hold their meetings in less "glitzy" locales.
It's a trend that has helped Pittsburgh but hurt Las Vegas, even though Vegas is often easier to get to and, in many cases, has more hotel rooms available for less money.
Gurley said most business travelers weren't going to resort locations for the amenities. Most business travel involves long meetings and working from early in the morning until late at night.
"It's a slog," she said. "The business traveler doesn't have time for these spa services."
Jeremy Handel, a spokesman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Association, said the number of convention attendees in January and February was down 28 percent from those same months of 2008. He said the number of visitors overall for the same period was down 10 percent.
The "sniff test," meanwhile, has been hurting the image of private air travel.
Vargo, at Corporate Air, said use of charter aircraft was down 30 percent nationwide.
Much of the drop in demand for chartered flights comes from the stigma that began when automobile executives took private jets to congressional hearings in Washington, then requested bailouts.
"They have this image of this greedy, cigar-smoking CEO sipping champagne from a ruby slipper," Vargo said.
The reality, he said, is far from that. "Eighty-six percent of flights are for lower- to mid-level managers, salespeople and technical experts," he said.
The flights also offer convenience and efficiency. "They show up five minutes prior to takeoff, and they're gone," he said. "They go to three different places, get business done on the ground and can be back on the ground to sleep at home."
Planes cost between $2,000 for an hour in flight to $8,000 for the larger Gulfstream G550, which can carry about 15 passengers.
Fewer executives flying means fewer trips to the airport for such cabbies as Chuckee, who said that he hadn't had enough fares that day to pay for the $140-a-day lease on his cab, not counting the price of gasoline.
His day started at 5 a.m. In past years, he could generally count on making enough to pay the lease by noon. That's not the case now.
Another cabbie, parked right behind him, said after 20 years of driving Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, he is considering getting out of the taxi business for good.
"Sometimes drivers don't make their lease," Chuckee said. "We're losing money and time because we have to pay the money upfront."
(Ann Belser can be reached at abelser(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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