March is the month when, once again, the majority of Americans reset their clocks, spinning ahead one whole hour to comply with Daylight Saving Time. When it comes, we can almost count on a certain number of bleary-eyed late arrivals to church services, or tee times, or brunch dates, or wherever else our calendars take us on that infamous second Sunday of the month.
Of course, people who rise and shine with the sun – farmers, for example – will tell you that it doesn’t make much difference; the night’s not any shorter, and we really haven’t saved one minute of daylight. However for those of us who live by the clock, it’s a big deal. That hour shift one way or the other can create huge problems – particularly when one has meetings to schedule and flights to book.
The popular notion that daylight saving was first proposed by Benjamin Franklin is actually a myth. The misconception was born out of a satire Franklin wrote in 1784 during his time as envoy to France. In it he purported to be shocked to discover that the sun actually rose at 6 AM, while most of Paris (himself included) slumbered until noon. To counter this profligate waste of cheap sunshine, Franklin’s tongue-in-cheek proposal was to fire cannon and ring church bells to awaken Parisians at first light. This, he claimed, would save candlewax – 64 million pounds of it – that the City of Light would otherwise consume by staying awake during the hours of darkness.
In fact, the credit for the concept of daylight saving goes to a New Zealander, George Hudson, who first proposed it in 1895. Since then daylight saving time has had a checkered history – on-again, off-again – and the subject of much ridicule and dispute. Even today, there are bills, amendments and proposals to do away with it, modify it or, in some cases, make DST a permanent fixture in certain states.
Whatever the objections, one thing is certain: for many, that first alarm clock on that second Sunday in March is an unwelcome jolt, one from which some of us never quite recover all summer long. Nevertheless, despite the contentiousness, daylight saving time is a fact that’s becoming more or less woven into the fabric of modern life.
It seems to be the nature of change to unnerve, to jolt the system. In the world of business travel, every day seems continually to be the second Sunday in March – somebody is always resetting the alarm, and the wakeup call comes earlier than most of us would like. Case in point: The subjects in this month’s issue of Business Travel Executive shine a light on some profound changes in managed travel.
In the hospitality business, there’s a Change Generation (page 20) – a new onslaught of travelers who are creating a revolution in hotels. Mobility is the watchword as ground transportation adapts to a brave new world where Technology Rules the Road (page 26). And in Touch & Go (page 12) we discover digital keys are opening doors to a new way of doing business, as consumer-led mobile payment solutions spread to corporate travel.
There’s more, of course, in this issue and in the months to come. Through it all, at BTE we make a point set our clocks early. It’s the only way we can be sure to keep up with an industry that seems perpetually set to spring ahead.
As for sleep – we can always catch up on that extra hour in November.