Life on the road isn’t as cushy as it used to be for business travelers, with employers counting their pennies more closely and airlines scaling back service and amenities.

It also is less crowded, at least for the time being, and that has benefited the diminished horde of road warriors by reducing congestion on runways and in the skies, freeing up better rooms at hotels and making it easier to use frequent flier miles to get bumped up to first class.

“It’s really pretty easy to upgrade,” said Mary O’Neill, who’s on the road nearly 300 days a year as director of worldwide development for Intel’s venture capital unit and is only allowed to purchase coach-class tickets.

O’Neill said she’s also had an easier time negotiating lower rates from hotels.

“They seem a little more hungry,” she said.

Time consuming

But, overall, corporate travelers say there is plenty more to gripe about these days as travel companies — especially airlines — cut back.

“They treat me like a FedEx package,” said Christopher Krueger, sales manager for the Owen Steel Company of Columbia, S.C.

Krueger’s complaint, a common one these days, was directed at the industrywide shift toward smaller, regional jets on longer flights, a trend that reflects the difficulty carriers have had filling the seats of bigger planes.

Mary O'Neill, director of worldwide development for Intel's venture capital unit, checks her watch before going through security at the Portland, Ore., airport. O'Neill was getting ready to board a flight to San Francisco last week. O'Neill, who is on the road nearly 300 days a year, said she has had an easier time of negotiating seat upgrades and lower hotel rates.

For example, regional jets were used in June for 36 percent of domestic flights between 300 and 999 miles long, according to Back Aviation Solutions of New Haven, Conn. That’s up 17 percent from June 2000 and comes as the proportion of narrow-bodied jets used for that distance fell from 71 percent to 57 percent during the same period.

Another consequence of airline cost-cutting that irks business travelers is that there are fewer flights to choose from, as carriers park planes in the desert in response to reduced demand.

“I used to say to clients I was visiting, ‘What time would you like to meet?’ Now I’m saying, ‘I can be there at 10, what time’s good for you?” said Linda Messano, vice president of government services for Procurenet, a Fairfield, N.J.-based logistics company.

Messano’s work schedule on the road has changed in other ways, too. While dinner and golf are still important for building camaraderie with colleagues and clients, there’s generally less down time on the road for company representatives these days since more often they will travel alone.

When planning a trip these days, Messano said, “you’re going to say ‘Do three of us really need to go?”

Different perspective

Not every business traveler carries a suitcase worth of complaints.

While waiting to depart from Washington’s Reagan National Airport recently, Pawan Kumar Chadha tried to put the situation in perspective. A native of Bombay who received a visa to work for a Dallas-based data storage company, Chadha said he is accustomed to taking business trips across India, which means riding jam-packed trains and buses that can be brutally inefficient and dirty.

“This is very refined,” he said, surveying the litter-free terminal and the steady flow of passengers moving through a security checkpoint.

But Intel’s O’Neill said she has to be much more frugal when it comes to event planning as clients and Intel’s travel managers pay much more attention to costs away from the home office. Gone are the days of raw seafood bars at swanky hotels and free limousine rides from the airport, she said.

“You don’t ever want to look like you’re spending a lot of money,” she said, “especially among clients who we’re encouraging to cut expenses.”

Travel costs down

Fortunately, it has been easier to keep travel expenses down lately.

Jerry Johnson, executive vice president at Brodeur Worldwide, a Washington-based marketing company, said he’s been upgrading to better hotel rooms lately without spending more.

“I’m not paying extra,” he said. “I’m just asking for it.”

Since the beginning of the year, hotel occupancy in the top 25 U.S. markets is down 2.4 percent, while nightly revenue per room is down about 4.4 percent, according to Smith Travel Research, a Hendersonville, Tenn.-based company that tracks lodging industry data.

Domestic airfares, meanwhile, are down about 4 percent compared with last year, according to the Washington-based Air Transport Assn.

However, business travelers are quick to point out that airlines have not done as good a job as hotels when it comes to customer service.

“My general impression is that the airlines have taken a different approach than the hotels,” said Patrick Byrne, who’s away from home roughly half the year as chief executive of Overstock.com, a Salt Lake City-based seller of distressed merchandise.

“The hotels seem to be giving you extra service and attention,” he said. “The airlines seem to be cutting corners.”