Mixing business with family pleasure on trips

How can a family preserve time together that normally would be consumed by work, and even turn it into an adventure and save money?

They can combine a family vacation with a parent’s business trip.

With budget restrictions in place in many homes and businesses, some travellers are using one trip to fulfil multiple needs.

According to a 2008 study by Egencia, the corporate travel arm of Expedia, 59 per cent of business travellers have had friends or family join them on a trip so they could spend free time together.

Andy Palmer, a co-founder of Vertica Systems and global head of software engineering at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Massachusetts, combines business travel with family time whenever he can.

He has taken his wife to Sweden and his daughter to Disney World.

One year Mr Palmer took his son out of sixth grade for 10 days so he could take him on a business trip to Idaho and Utah. They also found some time for fly-fishing.

“I hate travelling away from my family,” said Mr. Palmer, who lives in New Castle, “so having any of them with me is a million percent better.”

Last spring Mr Palmer’s wife, Amy, and their four children accompanied him to Basel, Switzerland, when he had work to do at the Novartis headquarters.

His family “ate and toured” while he worked during the day, and they all regrouped to dine together in the evening.

The children appreciated seeing where their father had to go so frequently.

“He wasn’t calling from a black hole after that — they could imagine the setting where he was,” Mrs. Palmer said.

Tacking personal time onto a work trip is a way to visit a place you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and to share that experience with your family, she added.

When Mary Sorensen of Seattle realized that her husband, Stan, would be taking a business trip to Paris at the same time that their children were on spring break, she sprang into action and rented an apartment there for 10 days.

“We took the opportunity to transport our life to France,” she said, “Every day we fixed Dad breakfast in the morning and sent him to work.”