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Introduction François managed to gather as much information as possible on his travel since December 1972, date when he started his first job. An Excel spreadsheet was created to list chronologically all trips, indicating the carrier used, the itinerary (airport codes). He constructed a model to compute great circle distances between two airports to work out the number of kilometres flown in total. He grouped the results by airline, by country and by airport. François traveled on 64 airlines. The most frequently used airline was Air France, followed by Swissair and British Airways. Air France was predominantly used to travel between Geneva and Paris and between Paris and New York, Paris and Pointe-à-Pitre. British Airways was used primarily to travel between Geneva and Montreal/Toronto (via London) and between Geneva and London for local trips to visit British Airways's headquarters and the London IATA office during the course of his duties. François logged over 2.2 million kilometres in total during the 26 year period covered. He visited 74 countries around the world. The most exciting places visited were Hong Kong, Bangkok, China, Brazil. The most hostile country was Nigeria. Wonderful cities visited include Prague, Paris, Vienna and Rome, all of them having a magnificent architectural beauty. He visited 116 airports. The most frequent visits (one visit equals either a take-off or a landing on a commercial aircraft) were made in Geneva (having spent 20 years working in Geneva), Paris (mainly as a transfer point to go to Guadeloupe and back) and Pointe-à-Pitre (naturally being the place of his first job). The most beautiful airport was Singapore. The most convenient for shopping was Amsterdam Singapore and Hong Kong. The most conveniently located airport was Geneva and Milan-Linate. The most distant airport from the centre of the city was Sao Paulo-Viracopos airport (over 100 kilometres) and Tokyo-Narita (nearly 70 kilometres). Another computer software enabled him to trace all flight on world maps to look at the density of travel by world region. Here are two different maps showing travel in Europe and travel in the rest of the world. François describes here a few exciting experience in travel, and also a few incidents. With all the experience gained in traveling 2.2 million kilometres around the world, Francois can provide some recommendations and tips to make travel an easy process.
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