Most of my business travel involves shorter domestic flights. After 9/11 it got to the point where it became FASTER to drive to many of those destinations, once you account for all the nonsense you go through at an airport. And the distance for which a drive is more efficient than a flight gets much greater for critical business trips where I would regularly fly a day early just to avoid catastrophic situations with delayed or canceled flights.
The absurdity of this was made clear a couple of years ago on a business trip where a half-dozen people in my group were flying to a Midwestern city from different points around the U.S. It was about a 10-hour drive from where I lived, so I made it a road trip.
One of the other guys lived two hours away from me in a neighboring state. At the end of our business-related work, I found out he was flying out of the Midwest airport a couple of hours after I was planning to head home. I offered to drop him off at the airport on the start of my 10-hour drive home. Not only did I get home more than two hours before him … but it turned out his trip home took so long because he had a connecting flight through the airport in the city where I lived.
This guy would have been better off paying me a couple of hundred dollars to drive him all the way home.
My new company is based in Ohio and I told them there was no way I was re-locating there for that, among other reasons, not even for the amount of extra money they were paying me. One of the subsidiaries has an office in Charlotte so I am largely working out of their offices (or from home).