The meetings still happen. The city does too

There's a version of business travel that goes: airport, hotel, conference room, airport. You've been somewhere without quite arriving. You come home with a stack of business cards and a faint memory of a city glimpsed from a taxi window.

I've done that version. I don't do it anymore.

The shift happened gradually, but New Orleans made it obvious. I was there for a conference and somewhere in the planning I made a decision: I was going to actually be in New Orleans. Not just present for the agenda, but in the city, using it, letting it do what New Orleans does to people who pay attention to it.

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We were experiencing something together rather than performing connection at each other over a canapé.

There's a reason Dua Lipa always looks like she's on vacation even when she's working. It's not because her schedule is light. It's because she seems to approach wherever she is with genuine curiosity, savoring the place rather than enduring it. The city is part of the experience, not a backdrop to it.

Many business travelers do the opposite. They create a sealed environment: the same hotel gym, the same airport lounge food, the same dinners in hotel restaurants because it's easier. The city outside could be any city. That's a waste, and not just personally. It's a missed opportunity professionally too.

The hotel question matters here too, for the same reasons it matters on a personal trip. A place with character, rooted in the city it's in, sets a different tone for the whole visit. You wake up somewhere that reminds you where you are. That's not incidental. It primes you to engage with the place rather than seal yourself off from it.

This isn't about budget. It's about choosing a property that has a point of view over one that could be anywhere. The business traveler who stays somewhere with soul tends to move through the city differently than the one whose hotel feels like a transit lounge.

New Orleans Did the Work for Me

I organized every meeting I could in places that reflected where we actually were. A breakfast at a spot in the French Quarter where the coffee comes with a history lesson if you ask. Catch-up conversations at a bar where the walls have absorbed decades of music. A working lunch somewhere that didn't look remotely like a conference room and was better for it.

What happened was interesting. The meetings were more relaxed, more honest, more human. People arrive differently when they're somewhere with atmosphere. The city creates a kind of ease that a hotel meeting room actively suppresses, and that ease is good for the kind of relationship building that actually matters in business. You remember the conversation because you remember where you were.

Then one evening I organized a group to go to a live music show. It wasn't formally on the agenda and it wasn't pitched as networking. It was just: we're in New Orleans, there's extraordinary music here, come if you want. Almost everyone came. It was one of the most genuinely connecting evenings of the whole trip, more so than any structured event, because it was real.

Where You Stay Is Still Part of It

MY HONEST TAKE

Business travel is one of the genuine privileges of certain kinds of work. You get sent somewhere, someone else pays for the flight, and you have a reason to be in a city you might not have chosen for yourself. That's worth something.

The practical traveler treats it as a logistical event to get through. I'd invite you to try treating it as a city you've been given a few days in, with a schedule built around it rather than in spite of it. Keep the meetings. Do them somewhere worth being. Then go find what the place is actually known for.

You'll close more business over a live set in New Orleans than you will in a conference breakout room. And you'll remember it.

The meetings are the reason you're there. The city is the opportunity.

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Eva Baczynska

June 20, 2025 • 8 min read