How often do you call home while traveling?
Every other day or less: 6%
Once a day: 54%
Twice a day: 26%
More than twice a day: 14% Juggling work and parenting is difficult no
matter what your profession; add frequent travel to the list, and
the balance gets even harder. To find out who is taking care of
meeting planners’ children, M&C and NTM Research in January
conducted an online survey of 320 planners, all of them parents of
children under 15 years old.
During the day, school is
where you’ll find the children of 68 percent of respondents; 40
percent indicated their kids also spend time in day care, and 17
percent said the children are at home.
Respondents take an average of 6.8 business trips a year
without their children. While they are gone, 74 percent say their
spouse takes care of the kids, and 17 percent place them in the
grandparents’ care. Most traveling planners (54 percent) check on
their children once a day.
Less than a third (31 percent) have taken their children on a
site inspection or fam trip. However, almost half (47 percent) have
taken their youngsters to an off-site meeting. For the most recent
meeting to which planners brought their families, 57 percent said
their spouse looked after the children while the planner was
working; 24 percent left the kids with a caretaker who had traveled
with them; 10 percent of respondents enrolled the little ones in a
hotel-sponsored children’s program; 6 percent kept their children
with them at all times; and 3 percent enrolled the kids in a
program sponsored by the meeting host.