Winter weather poses travel problems

Ah, business travel. It is never easy this time of year. And if you are planning a big conference, that has to keep you up at night.

A case in point -- the huge health IT conference, HIMMS, which kicks off today in New Orleans. (HIMMS is one of those acronyms that doesn't really stand for anything any more, kinda like FOSE, but it is short for Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.)

So a bunch of people from the 1105 Government Information Group (formerly know as FCW Media Group) were heading down there. Last year, of course, we started our Government Health IT publication. Health IT is a huge area, particularly for the government. (We have recently started a GHIT blog. Read it at www.govhealthit.com/blogs/ghittoday/ ).

But, as you may have heard, Washington, D.C. and a huge swath of the country from the Midwest to the Northeast was struck by bad weather.

The result: Many canceled flights out of Washington Dulles International Airport yesterday, when a number of people were going to be heading down to New Orleans for HIMMS. PaulMcCloskey, GHIT's editor, who lives in Chicago, spent most of the day stuck at the airport there. He will get down to New Orleans, but not until Tuesday, Anne Armstrong, president of the 1105 Government Information Group, spent hours at Dulles only to get her flight canceled. They could reschedule it for Tuesday, but she would arrive in New Orleans a few hours before her return flight.

One person described the scene at Dulles this way:

It was quite a scene at the gate at Dulles yesterday when they kept canceling and then reinstating the flight. I knew about half my fellow passengers. They all were going toHIMSS , including one SAP man who had flown in from Munich! None will get there before late tomorrow.