Airline woes give teleconferences a lift

— -- Sales consultant Bailey Allard of Chapel Hill, N.C., is offering more Web sessions to please Fortune 100 clients with slim travel budgets.

Bence Boelcskevy, a pharmaceutical industry executive who lives in Columbus, Ohio, plans to keep cutting travel and increase videoconferences.

And business development executive Raja Suresh, of Bloomington, Minn., has moved his division's internal meetings to the Web in the last four months.

The teleconferencing industry has been growing steadily since 2000, but sweeping flight cutbacks this fall by many of the USA's biggest airlines, paired with rising airfares and the overall weak economy, are expected to fuel it further.

It's the kind of environment that can make travelers — and managers — replace a marginal meeting and meet remotely instead.

"With the additional threat of flight cuts, everybody's going to do what they can to not travel," says Scott Etzler, CEO of Chicago-based InterCall, the USA's largest seller of conference call services.

He expects to see more clients restrict travel in the coming months and conduct more meetings on the phone, the Web and with video cameras.

"With good implementation of video, you can start cutting back on travel," Kourey says.

Missing the personal touch

Still, many meetings require a real handshake.

Arthur Manask, a food service consultant based in Burbank, Calif., who recently visited clients in Puerto Rico and Philadelphia in a single week, helps culinary schools and restaurants improve their operations. So far, none have asked for remote sessions, as "much of what we do has to be done in person," he says.

And conferencing has its own set of problems.