However, after hearing Mayor Rudolph Guiliani urge the city and the country to fight back by returning to normal, the company decided to go ahead with the original plan. Sun flew its top executives, including CEO Scott McNealy, cross-country to Manhattan for the event.
Sun had offices in the World Trade Center. None of the 340 employees in the office that morning were killed or reported missing, but the company did lose one employee, a passenger aboard one of the planes that crashed on September 11.
Melissa Abernathy, a spokeswoman for American Express Corporate Services, notes that several trends in travel have emerged across a broad spectrum of industries. In an unofficial poll of about 20 of the firms largest customers, she says agents found that companies are reacting in one of three ways to the tragic events. Some, like Sun, are not making any changes to travel policy and are actually going out of their way to encourage travel. Others, like Riverstone and Cisco, are restricting nonessential travel or limiting travel for a set period of time. And still others like TrueSAN seem to be canceling most of their employee travel indefinitely.
"A lot of the travel thats being cut is intra-company, where video conferencing or business tools can be used to accomplish the same goals with employees," says Abernathy." The deal-closing trips are still being taken. Thats just the way Americans do business."
The best indicator for how much companies will cut back on travel is to look at the U.S. airline industry, which earns the bulk of its revenue from business travelers, Abernathy points out. Most U.S. carriers have already cut schedules by 20 percent to offset huge losses experienced during the week of September 11, but they are also figuring in additional losses expected in the near term.
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