In preparing to write this I came across this photo from 2017 of the amenities of a United Global First seat. The whole intention was to write a trip report, give my take on the experience, and create a little traffic on this blog. As you guessed, I never wrote that trip report. I got as far as uploading the photos and then had real work and real life get in the way. But on top of all of that, I don’t know that I am the best person to write trip reports.

I love aviation, flying, and all of the fun amenities that come with the airline experience but I am also someone who loves getting where I am going and being rested and ready to go when I get there. This typically means I may or may not eat the meal on a longhaul flight and usually spend a good chunk of the time sleeping. For example, on a recent British Airways flight in business class from Portland to London and onward to Lisbon I ate part of the dinner and slept right up until our final descent into London. I was only going to be in Europe for 5-6 days and was there for work, so being on the local time and not completely jet-lagged was priority number one.

Even on daytime flights my goal is to adjust to the destination time zone as painlessly as possible and this almost always involves some amount of sleep on the plane. On a recent Denver to Munich flight in business class I slept almost six out of the ten hours. I didn’t even eat the main meal, lunch, right after departure from Munich. Instead I put my seat down and went to bed in the hopes of jumpstarting my return to west coast time.

For me, most trip reports could be broken down into food and sleep and a few questions around those. Did I eat? Was it edible and filling? Did I sleep? Was it restful and comfortable? If the answers to most of those questions is “yes” then the whole trip report could be summarized with “It was fine”.

Most trip reports seem to focus on squeezing the maximum amount of “value” or perks out of a trip where my view of value is whether or not I was able to hit the ground running for work or was I able to return home rested and ready to spend time with family after a long or stressful work trip. I don’t think either view is necessarily wrong but I do believe my experience is very different and also not very compelling to read.

Let’s go back to that trip from 2017. Here is the main course served on that flight. It was fine. Nothing earthshattering or amazing. It was run of the mill airplane food. 
Yeah, it was better than economy but definitely wasn’t at restaurant quality. And to be honest, most airplane food is never going to be restaurant quality. Sure you might get a really nice champagne, wine or even caviar but overall most airplane food is just that.

I don’t know, maybe you all want to read about what work travel is really like. Feel free to let me know. In the meantime, there are a number of bloggers writing really in-depth trip reports. On top of that, there are vloggers creating some great trip reports on YouTube.

Let me know what you think, do I write the boring work travel reports?