“Stranded …”Friday, June 27 … How to begin?

We opened a rainy day in Shanghai with a visit to a local Subway store. The visit was led by their operations manager for the Subway stores in Shanghai and the surrounding province. He was incredibly personable and accommodating, and he took us on a tour of three other nearby Subway stores. As part of their localization strategy, Subways in China have a lobster-salad sandwich, in addition to the classic menu from home, which is surprisingly delicious! An interesting business point he highlighted is Subway’s ability to locate multiple stores within close proximity without cannibalizing sales from each other. This is due to the different market segments that each store targets. While one of the stores located at a major Shanghai landmark is geared mainly to tourists, the nearby shopping center store targets more local shoppers. Another nearby Subway store caters almost exclusively to daily office workers. This was an excellent and informative visit. It also made a number of strategy, legal, marketing, operations, HR and leadership issues we studied in our various courses come to life. A big shout out from Asia to our Cal Poly alumni (you know who you are!), for helping set up this visit for us and for all you do for the college and its students. We really appreciate your time and support. This was a fantastic visit and learning experience.

After leaving Subway we were dropped off at the Shanghai Maglev train – a commuter railway which is actually the world’s fastest train. The train levitates on electromagnets, and reached a top speed of four hundred thirty-two kilometers per hour while we were riding it. The sole purpose of the train is to provide rapid transit between the Pudong district and the Shanghai International Airport. The conventional one hour car ride is accomplished in only fifteen minutes on the Maglev. Through this ride and experience, we caught a glimpse of China’s future infrastructure plans, as we were advised it plans to build similar lines along its eastern seaboard.

Once we got to the airport the fun really started. An international business trip wouldn’t really be complete without a world-class travel debacle, and this one was a doozy. First, we discovered that our Shanghai-Hong Kong flight was drastically delayed due to the typhoon near Hong Kong, and thus would undoubtedly miss our connecting flight to Delhi. After eleven of us checked our baggage in to the airlines, Cathay called an “emergency staff meeting,” suspending all baggage check until 8:00 pm. The eleven of us that did have our baggage checked had already passed through customs, and were enjoying a leisurely meal in the airport food court, and had no idea that the rest of our group was stuck back at the baggage check area. After a couple hours and multiple indecipherable airport pages from the rest of the group we made contact via instant message on someone’s laptop. We were then escorted backwards through customs in order to reconvene with the rest of the group, earning us a rare “canceled” stamp on our China visa. Once back at the check in area we waited for baggage check to reopen and were reissued boarding passes, as our first ones had been voided. Then we re-entered Customs and security, and eventually boarded the aircraft about five hours behind schedule. We did not arrive in Hong Kong until 2:30 am.

Upon arrival in Hong Kong the leaders and translating students spent about three to four hours diligently working with the airline to try and get our group on to the next flight to Delhi. The problem was there were almost no flights departing for Delhi for the next two days and the airline would only be able to guarantee seats for twenty out of the forty-six people in our group. The remaining people would have to fly standby with no guarantee that they would get a seat. Many of us slept (or tried to sleep) on the ground near the check in counter. As the airport geared up for the morning, the twenty randomly selected people who were guaranteed seats left for the gate, while the rest of us hung out in the food court, dreading the coming day of standby status. Minutes before the flight was scheduled to leave, we were greeted by the good news that twenty-one more of us had found seats on the morning flight. However this meant that five people would be left behind to wait for a later flight departing that night.

The forty-one of us that did get on the flight gratefully touched down in Delhi at around 3:00 pm on Saturday, twenty-five hours after arriving at the Shanghai Airport. As we staggered out through Indian customs, many of us spotted our luggage on the nearby carousel. As the minutes ticked on, however, the students who had been deemed standby began nervously shifting our weight. As the last pieces of luggage arrived on the carousel, our fears were confirmed. All standby students had lost our luggage. We proceeded to a counter where we filed a complaint form, which was then hand copied and recopied by the local authorities. We then met our Indian hosts, and were finally brought to our Indian Hotel, where we were able to take a very welcome but cold shower.

This past day served as a wake up call to a facet of doing global business that can be a real challenge — airport and travel delays. It clearly takes the right type of person and employee to be able to hang with these types of travel bumps and challenges.