How to Contact
Joe Brancatelli
Joe Brancatelli
Want to E-mail me? Fire away. I'm at [email protected]. I'm also on Twitter at @joesentme. The DM feature is always on.
Need me for a print, Web or radio interview? Happy to help.
Just need some background? Happy to help. JoeSentMe.com is a reader-supported, non-commercial subscription site, so we are not in competition with anyone. All our volunteer writers and editors are happy to assist.
Need me for a television interview? I'm happy to try to help, but, as you can see, I am old, bald and bespectacled. Taking care of the glare is up to you …
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT JOE SENT ME
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, print publications and travel sites abandoned their commitment to provide news, views and information to business travelers. Several, including biztravel.com, where Joe was lead columnist, shut down because the wealthy travel agent who owned it couldn't be bothered to provide information while business travelers weren't buying tickets from him.
Joe was appalled by that selfish attitude. And appalled that no newspaper, magazine or Web site stepped up to provide communications between business travelers during those dangerous and extraordinary times.
So with very little money and even less technological expertise, he started JoeSentMe.com. It launched on September 27, 2001, with new editions of his columns, The Brancatelli File and the Tactical Traveler. He cobbled together a mailing list from E-mails he'd received from business travelers over the years. He was quickly joined by a talented crew of other columnists and writers who wanted to get their message out to business travelers. All these years later, Joe and the crew soldier on because someone has to help business travelers without fleecing them or selling them stuff.
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT JOE
Joe took his first business trip as a 19-year-old journalism student. He drove from New York to Buffalo to sell a homemade magazine he created in college. He never made it. The car broke down--and he spent the night in a frigid gas station listening to his only cassette (Neil Young's Harvest) over and over.
His second business trip was better. He flew to Atlanta on an airline that no longer exists (Eastern) from a terminal building that no longer exists (the old Terminal One at JFK) on a plane that no longer flies (a DC-8) for a price that few would admit ever existed (a $94 roundtrip youth fare).
More than 45 years later, he's logged countless miles, spent way too many nights in mediocre hotels, wasted far too many hours in airline clubs and drunk far too much bad coffee. (So much coffee, in fact, that he has switched to tea.) In other words, he's just your Average Joe Business Traveler.
Why all the business travel? Joe's one of those journalists who has spent his entire adult life on the road. Along the way he has marveled at, laughed at and railed at almost everything the travel industry does. Why? Because the travel industry never seems to make sense to him or any other business traveler he knows.
Although JoeSentMe.com is his passion, Joe Brancatelli makes his living as a publications consultant. He has helped create, launch or reposition more than 100 newspapers and magazines. Other extensive journalism credits include reporting and commentary for publications as diverse as Forbes, Fortune, Washington Post, Village Voice, Washington Star, Women's Wear Daily, Esquire, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, GQ, Portfolio, New York and Newsweek.
For better and for worse, Joe also has a long association with travel journalism. He served as executive editor of Frequent Flyer magazine; "Travel Adviser" of Travel Holiday magazine; and contributing editor of Travel & Leisure magazine. He's hosted a nationally syndicated radio program on travel, too. In 2007, he created the weekly Seat 2B business-travel column for Conde Nast Portfolio, the short-lived business magazine. But the column survived the magazine by almost a decade at Conde Nast's BizJournals.com. His business travel columns have also appeared at Biztravel.com, Mapquest.com, Trip.com and others.
He lives with his wife (who's also a business traveler) in Cold Spring, New York, in a 19th-century house that overlooks the Hudson River. The view is spectacular--and he always wonders why he drives to the airport for another business trip.