Dan Gold has had a hectic lifestyle for the past year, jetting all over Europe in his role as a Junior Analyst with a pan-European consulting firm. We caught up with him to ask about the pros and cons of the business travel lifestyle….

Were you looking for a job that involved travel?

Yes – I always had an idea that in my early to mid twenties I wanted at least a taste of the fast-paced business travel lifestyle. After all, you aren’t going to want to be away from home all week or for months at a time when you have a family. Plus I speak French and German, with passable Italian, so I was keen to put these skills to use. I was glad when I had my interviews with my company – a consulting firm in the technology sector – as I was told they had chosen their office site deliberately to be closer to Heathrow! They even mentioned in my contract that the work would involve a lot of to’ing and fro’ing – although not in quite those words!

How soon after you joined did you go away for the first time? What was it like?

I went to Milan in my second week, which wasn’t bad. As we are quite a small company I spent most of the day before finding and booking flights and a hotel. We do have secretaries who sometimes do that kind of thing for us but as a junior analyst sometimes you feel a bit rude asking! They prefer – I suspect – to stick to doing the partners’ arrangements. But yes –pretty much as soon as I’d got used to my new desk, and new London commute, I was off to Italy. It was the first of many trips! I guess I was a bit more excited about that one than the others since. I flew with one of the partners for a meeting, feeling very important in my suit and new laptop-briefcase. I even did some work on the plane – not that I understood much at that stage! Having my first ever proper meeting in Italy – in Italian – was kind of fun. Already it felt less routine than what a lot of my Cambridge contemporaries were doing.

How long have you tended to be away from London for?

Normally just a day or a few days, but I also shared a flat in Paris for a while as we needed to be there so much that hotels stopped being economic. It was fun having the budget to find somewhere comfy and upmarket in a nice area – we went for the 16th as it was near the offices of our French partners. Also the commute was fantastic too – it’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you are strolling through Paris in the early morning.

Your friends must have been envious!

Well in a way it’s not half as good as it sounds. Because of the need to be in London fairly frequently, regardless of commitments abroad, if you are ‘living’ in Paris or elsewhere in Europe what you end up doing is living a strange dual existence, with parts of each week there and parts in London. I actually find it really hard to make that arrangement work – tending to find that I’m too tired to explore when in Paris or wherever, and not feeling like I have enough time to do everything I want to do when I go back to London.

So it’s not all glamorous then?

Not at all. If you email someone during the week and tell them you are in Milan, they will send you something back saying how lucky you are. And if they are sitting in an office in Canary Wharf at the time – in the same seat that they sit in every day of every week – then who would blame them? But they don’t see the bad side – the early morning rises to get taxis to the airport, the late (and sometimes delayed) flights back to London on Friday evenings… Many a time I have been in an airport at 9pm on a Friday, wishing I was back in the London office and able to go out after work!

What are the main pros and cons then?

Pros – it’s different, gives you new experiences and helps break the monotony of the working weeks and months. You can practice your languages if you speak them, and get a feel for how people in different countries do business. Also having a company credit card does help! It means eating in great restaurants and staying in top hotels. So generally it is a pretty comfortable existence. But having said that – cons - you are spending your week dragging around and living out of a mini-suitcase. It’s exhausting – more so than you think – flying 2-4 times a week; you really feel it on the weekends. And as I said, unless you get a sustained time period in a foreign city – and time to really get to know it and meet people - you can get stuck in an unsatisfactory ‘half-way house’ lifestyle which is neither one thing or the other, and where its difficult to spend time with your friends and meet new people.

Lastly – any advice for wannabe or soon-to-be business travellers?

I think you just need to be prepared to focus on the good – the variation, the nice food etc. – and put up with the hassles. Its certainly worth doing for a time I’d say – nothing’s worse than being stuck in the same place day after day. But don’t expect it to be a holiday! In fact, now I feel weird when I go abroad and I’m not in my suit carrying my laptop!