Ask most founders about business travel and you will hear the same story. A cramped early flight, a taxi, a room that looks like every other room, a day of meetings, and the same journey in reverse. You arrive frazzled, you work on adrenaline, and you get home too wired to think straight. We have all decided this is just what travelling for work feels like.
It does not have to. A quiet shift is happening among people who run their own businesses, and it is worth paying attention to. Instead of optimising every trip for speed, they are deliberately slowing some of them down, and finding they think better, decide better and come back with more than they left with.
Speed is not the same as productivity
The instinct to shave every minute off a journey makes sense on paper. In practice, the red-eye and the tight connection cost you in ways that never show up on the expense report. You cannot do deep work in a security queue. You cannot have a real conversation with a co-founder while you are both watching the departure board. The time you save in transit you lose twice over in a foggy head at the other end.
Slower travel flips that. A long train journey is several uninterrupted hours with no notifications demanding you land the plane, no gate changes, no scramble. It is the rarest thing in a founder’s week: time that is genuinely yours, with a moving window instead of a wall.
The trip as thinking time, not dead time
Some of the best strategic thinking happens when you are slightly removed from the day to day. There is a reason so many founders have their clearest ideas on a long walk or a quiet flight. A journey with real space in it, rather than a sprint between terminals, gives your brain room to do the work that the office never lets it do.
This is where the more considered end of travel earns its place. Take something like the Golden Eagle Danube Express luxury train, which winds through Central and Eastern Europe at a pace that makes the journey the point rather than an obstacle. You are not enduring the travel to get to the work. The travel is the setting the work happens in, or the reset that lets you go back to it sharper. For a founder who never switches off, a few days where the scenery does the moving and you do the thinking is not an indulgence. It is maintenance.
A better way to reward a team, or yourself
There is a practical business case too. When you want to mark a milestone, thank a team that pulled off something hard, or simply spend real time with a partner or co-founder away from screens, a shared journey does something a voucher never will. People remember the trip. They remember the conversations that only happen when nobody is checking the time.
The same is true for founders who spend the year giving everything to the business and rarely stop. A deliberate, memorable trip is not money wasted. It is the thing that keeps you from burning out, and a burned out founder is the single most expensive problem a small company can have.
How to build slow travel into a busy year
You do not need to overhaul how you travel. Keep the quick flights for the trips that genuinely need speed. But once or twice a year, pick a journey where the point is the journey. Block it out the way you would block a strategy day, because that is really what it is. Bring the one big question you never get time to sit with. Leave the laptop shut for the parts that are for resting and open it only when the ideas start arriving, because they will.
The founders getting this right are not working less. They are choosing, a couple of times a year, to travel in a way that gives them something back rather than taking it all. In a job that runs on your judgement and your energy, that might be the smartest use of a few days you make all year.
Related reading: What Are the Legal Ways to Spy on Competitors’ Websites and Which Parts Of Your Marketing AI Is Good At (And Which It Isn’t).
This builds on my main productivity guide, my main guide on the topic.
Worth a read if this is your situation: write for us about travel.
