If you travel for work, try living in a hotel instead of a home: Report

By Sarah Rappaport

  At Bloomberg Pursuits, we love to travel. And we always want to make sure we’re doing it right. So we’re talking to road warriors to learn about their high-end hacks, tips and off-the-wall experiences. These are the  Distinguished Travel Hackers.

Marion Emmanuelle Bullôt is constantly on the road. As managing partner at AvroKO hospitality group,  she jets around the globe, working on restaurant, bar and hotel projects—her clients have included the Hoxton’s opening in Chicago’s Fulton Market district and Richard Branson’s Virgin Voyages cruise ships. She started her career in restaurants, working with celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White. In 2017 and 2018, she clocked  some 300,000 miles in the air—more recently her average has hovered around 200,000.

 

Her airline of choice is Air New Zealand, having flown hundreds of thousands of miles with them. “The service is excellent,” she says. “And the products they’re able to launch, like the Skycouch, are pretty amazing, normally you have to pay big bucks to lay flat in the sky but they’ve been able to figure it out in economy.” Bullôt says the offering—which lets travelers buy an economy seat and turn it into a lie-down bed option—was a lifesaver on a recent trip between Auckland and New York with her six-month-old baby. “For me, being able to lie flat is the most important feature; I don’t need all the bells and whistles of business class.”

 

Bullôt says she’s been able to combat jet lag not with apps or by moving her sleep patterns, but instead by booking the right flights that let her get a good night sleep. “Smart business travel is always about thinking strategically—when am I going to arrive, what do I need to do—and pick the flights that set you up for success.”  Bullôt, 42, who is from France, lives with her husband and son in New Zealand. Here are her travel tips.

 

Book a hotel room for the night before you arrive in a destination to avoid afternoon check-in

 

Oftentimes, I would have meetings that start right when I got off the plane and that was very, very difficult. So what I started doing instead is calling the hotel I was set to stay in and pay for an additional night so I could check in at 8:30 a.m. or whenever I got out of the airport so I could have a few hours sleep. Hotels make sure a room is ready for you when you arrive if you just contact them in advance.  I’ve done this so many times and it works so well, you can just drop your luggage, jump in bed, set your alarm, sleep two hours, get dressed and then go to your meetings after noon or so and feel so much better.

 

Funnily enough, I’d rather fly from New Zealand to New York—a 16 hour flight— than from New York to London because it’s only a six hour flight and you can’t get any sleep on that particular flight. By the time you’ve fallen asleep on the New York to London route, you’ve already landed. At least on the long flight from New Zealand, you can get some rest. I hate jet-lag and will do almost anything I can to avoid it. 

 

If you’re constantly traveling, it might make sense to live in a hotel instead of renting an apartment

  I was living in New York City and I was running one of AvroKO’s consultancies, so my projects could be just about anywhere. One day I might have had to be in China and the next day, Rio de Janeiro, so it was a lot of work to maintain an apartment. I just did some quick math and discovered that it would actually cheaper for me to live out of hotels. I decided to to try that our for two or three months, but ended up living out of hotels for around two and a half years.  

 

I stayed at different properties, but the Standards in New York, both the one in the East Village and the High Line ended up on heavy rotation for me. What that meant for me was: I built relationships with the concierges, which helped me secure restaurant reservations at hard-to-get tables in the city, and took meetings  at the hotel’s lobbies and coffee shops which made my life easier. And there other perks too, of course. One day, the hotel staff at the Standard ended up giving me the penthouse suite and jokingly mentioning that Leonardo DiCaprio had just checked out of that room the night before. And I was like, Oh my God. It was a Monday night for me. I had an early flight to Fayetteville, Arkansas of all places. So I certainly did not throw the kind of party that Leo likely had the night before. 

 

French Polynesia is unfairly off the radar for most elite travelers—pick it over the Maldives.

 

It’s also only a five-hour flight for me, so it feels like our Hawaii.  I think for some people, it’s known as being prohibitively expensive, which in some ways, it clearly is. There are some world-class properties like the Brando, where President Obama went at the end of his second presidential term to write his book where a room can be $3,000 dollars a night.

 

But there are ways to explore French Polynesia it in quite a cost-effective way. There’s some really great AirBnbs that are $100 or $200 a night and just magical.  The advice I give people is to treat yourself to a few days in resorts like the Brando, Four Seasons Bora Bora or the newly renovated Conrad hotel, and then spend another week exploring by staying in AirBnBs and exploring the smaller islands beyond Tahiti and Bora Bora. Sometimes, it’ll feel like you have an entire small island to yourself.

 

Know which flight you need to book in advance if your journey gets canceled 

 

After a few nightmarish travel experiences in 2021 and 2022, I now always consider the worst-case scenario: a canceled flight, or a missed connection. I don’t dwell on it, but I spend just enough time planning to ensure I have a backup in place, which means knowing immediately which new flight I’d have to book myself on if I miss my connection or if a flight is canceled. As we know these days, getting ahold of someone on the phone these days in incredibly difficult.

 

Having a backup plan to hand not only reduces stress in the moment, but it also gives you a head start over the other 200 passengers of your canceled flight as they try to figure out what to do, as you’ve already rebooked yourself on the next flight out of your destination. Worry about claiming back costs later and be decisive. 

 

Make friends with the flight attendants 

 

I have a baby, and everyone knows about the bassinet seats in economy. But I find that oftentimes if you speak to the flight attendants, they’ll have special tips. I flew TAP Air Portugal recently with my baby in business class and they gave me the tip to put my baby in that little tunnel where you put your feet when you lay flat— they said babies fit really well there, they're really comfortable. I thought that was crazy but he was really comfortable and I have some very cute photos of him in that little spot. It's not an actual product by the airlines or anything, but the flight attendants have seen it all.