Consider Zhihang Chi, the vice president and general manager for Air China's North America office in El Segundo, Calif., who often takes his own carrier's 13-hour nonstop flight from Los Angeles to Beijing and back.
He does not even need to book a hotel room. He leaves Los Angeles at 1:40 a.m. local time, attends meetings in Beijing over the next 10 hours the next day, leaves Beijing at 9 p.m. and lands back in Los Angeles by 6 p.m. the same day.
Gary Peterson, executive vice president for Protiviti, an audit and risk advisory company, uses United's Circle Pacific program to fly from San Francisco to Sydney, then on to any of several Asian cities, for less than he would pay to fly business class round-trip to Tokyo.