This year was my first full year working for Veeam and my role being global, requires me to travel to locations and events where my team presents content and engages with technical and social communities. We also travel to various Veeam related training and enablement events throughout the year as well as customer and partner meetings where and when required. I had set expectations about what a travel year might look like and in truth I found 2017 to be just right in terms of time away working verses being at home working and also being with the family.

Without doubt the highlight of the year was VeeamON in New Orleans where I was able to participate in an industry event working for the vendor holding the show. Other highlights include presenting at VMworld, attending and presenting at a number of VeeamON and VMware Forums, Tours and user groups around APJ, attending EMEA SE Training in Warsaw and my first visit to Russia to meet with our R&D teams. I started the year with Sales Kick off in Orlando and finished with a team meeting in Boston, Thanksgiving in Phoenix and finally AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas.

So…what does all that travel look like?

Being homed in Perth, Western Australia I’m pretty much in the most isolated capital city in the world, meaning any flight is going to be significant. Even just flying to Sydney takes four to five hours…the same time it takes me to fly to Singapore. I love looking at stats and there are a number of tools out there that manage flight info. I use Tripit to keep track of all my tips, and there are now a number of sites that let you import your flight data to analyis.

With that my raw stats for 2017 are shown below:

Upon reflection I probably didn’t travel as much as I thought I would with my away from home percentage being a relatively modest 28.4% of which I know isn’t high compared with others in my team, others at Veeam and certainly others in the industry. Where I did come out on top was in the distance travelled. Almost 263 thousand kilometers…a byproduct of living in Perth.

Of those 104 days away apparently I spent nearly 15 days in the air which is amazing when you think about it. When I travel to the USA I do take some of the longest routes in the world however my longest flight was not SYD-DFW but LAX-MEL.

I took 67 total flights across 21 airports and 6 airlines.

Interestingly I made it 70% to the moon in terms of distance, flew mostly on a Saturday which surprised me and my average flight time to 5:12 hours.

In terms of delays I think I got off pretty lightly with only 6 hours of departure delays and 4 hours of arrival delays…though I did have an interesting experience on my way back from VeeamON that technically delayed me a whole day…the less talked about that the better 🙂

Those that know me know that I am a bit of a plane snob and though I don’t have the plane nerd knowledge of Rick Vanover, I do like my planes big, new, shiny and modern. I still can’t go past the A380 and A330 but of late, the more I travel to Singapore the more I appreciate the more modern 737s.

So that’s a quick round up of what my year looked like living the life of a Global Evangelist/Technologist at Veeam. In one years time i’ll be very interested to see how 2018 shaped up compared to 2017!

References:

https://www.jetitup.com/MyStats/See/?name=Anthony~Spiteri

All stats were generated by Jet It Up and flight info was imported from Tripit.