Who’s a Travel Manager in 1988?

Last weekend we left off with a mention of Oct. 19, 1987 or Black Monday—the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 22.6 percent and triggered concern over a second Great Depression. I fully expected the stock market crash to reverberate through the business travel world in 1988, ushering in broad stroke travel freezes. I found a few localized drawbacks for travel, but they were largely tied to downturns in the oil and gas industries, which I remember well even as a teenager, since I grew up in Oklahoma. It wasn’t pretty.

But as I pored through the BTN archive this week, I’m not sure I found a single mention of Black Monday in 1988’s issues. One reason was that, although it…