BUSINESS TRAVELERS NEED BETTER GRASP OF GEOGRAPHY.

Byline: Larry Bleiberg Dallas Morning News

You're a globe-trotting executive. You've been out of school for decades. Why in the world do you need to know geography? Marc Mancini will fill you in.

He'll tell you about the Hong Kong-bound traveler who left home Sunday night and arrived in Asia to discover that his reservation for a hotel room on Monday was worthless. The problem? He had crossed the international date line and it was Tuesday.

Asian innkeepers say it happens every week, Mancini said.

Then there's the business traveler arriving in Melbourne in July with summer clothes. She shivered through her visit because it was the middle of winter in Australia.

Mancini, a Los Angeles-based professor and travel consultant who spoke at a Dallas seminar recently, said business travelers need geography more than anyone else. For them, geography isn't a theoretical study of maps and countries. It's day-to-day life.

The geographically challenged can place part of the blame on the American education system. Many adults never took a geography class. Instead, they received a cursory overview of the subject in a class called ``social studies.''

The tide is now turning for many of today's students, thanks in part to the National Geographic Society's relentless push for geographic education. But for the rest of us, the results are laughable and humbling.

``There are people out there who think they can take a cruise to Las Vegas or take Amtrak from New York to London. They probably think the English Channel is something they can find on cable,'' said Mancini, who was named 1994 educator of the year by the Society of Travel and Tourism Educators.

He cited the true story of a man from New Mexico who couldn't buy tickets to last year's Olympics. The clerk in Atlanta insisted that Santa Fe, N.M., was in Mexico, not the United States.

Funny? Maybe. But when people who don't know geography make business decisions, the results can be troubling.

Some attending Mancini's seminar had stories to share. One woman, a corporate travel manager from the Midwest who didn't want to be named, said she was drawn to the session for two reasons. She used to love geography, and she recently discovered she doesn't remember it as well as she thought.

Her firm has been sending employees to Malaysia, but she said she was surprised to discover where it was located.

``I thought it was farther north,'' she said.

She also didn't know Indonesia was practically next door to Malaysia. She had been sending employees to both countries, not realizing how easy it would be to a combine a trip to both destinations.

During his two-hour seminar, Mancini helped refresh his audience's geographic knowledge and let them in on secrets they may never have learned.

Too many people who work in the travel industry don't know how to read a map, he said.

Maps, he noted, are distorted because they provide a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world. That's why on most globes, Greenland looks four times larger than Mexico, even though both countries are almost the same size.

The problem can affect business travelers. The shortest route between two points isn't always a straight line on a map. In general, he said, when traveling to the east or west, the shortest path curves toward the pole. That's why it's quicker to fly Los Angeles to Tokyo via Anchorage, Alaska, than it is by stopping in Hawaii.

But sometimes there's a legitimate excuse for a geographic gaffe.

Mancini told about one travel planner who was mystified when she received a scribbled note asking her to book a trip to Maconga. The destination sounded vaguely African, but she didn't know where it was. She searched in vain, checking atlases and flight guides.

Finally, she begged a friend to discreetly inquire about Maconga's location. The answer helped clear things up. The boss was headed for the American South. His destination? Macon, Ga.