Business Travel Tips

American Express Business Travel tool Pre-Trip Auditor, launched to US customers in 2007, is now also available to Canadian customers.

The tool provides improved control of travel policies by allowing companies to easy review business travel prior to ticketing.

Pre-Trip Auditor enables authorized employees to easily review and approve — or decline if not conforming to the guidelines of the corporate travel policy, trips booked by employees.

Main benefits of Pre-Trip Auditor include:
- audits of all online and offline bookings for policy compliance;
- identification of out-of-policy bookings, which can increase preferred supplier usage and drive cost savings;
- reduction in errors, delays, and potential fraud,
- support of traveller security initiatives;
- automation of manual travel authorization processes;
- detailed reporting to analyze compliance by company, division and individual.
Details at americanexpress.ca/businesstravel.

Air taxi operator DayJet ceased the passenger operations the last week-end.

Based in Florida, Dayjet mostly flew business travelers on a ‘per-seat, on-demand’ basis between more than 60 airports across five states, mostly using the Eclipse model 500 ‘very light jet’ aircraft.

The company said external economic factors caused the move to suspend the flights.

Aviation Week has written that the FAA spokesman said that DayJet retains its operating certificate and that company officials did not indicate whether the carrier was permanently going out of business.

A real competitor for iPhone is expected to appear in the stores in November.

The HTC Touch HD, is a Windows Mobile phone with a 5 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, GPS, a 528MHz processor and a 480×800 screen resolution.
More photos and details of HTC Touch HD.

Beginning September 23, 2008 Air Canada passengers will not have to pay a fee for checking in a second bag.

Air Canada announced that it is eliminating its 25$ fee for a second checked bag for North American travel with Tango and Tango Plus fares.

The Canadian airline becomes the first major North American carrier to remove second checked bag fees.

Air Canada also announced it is including fuel surcharges directly into the price of a ticket for all North American travel.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says in its blog it has been working for a few months on a system for checking the authenticity of the boarding passes.

“….a team of people at TSA went to work on it. They’re working very closely with our airline partners to incorporate a strong digital signature into the barcode on every boarding pass.
The technique we’ve selected allows existing 2D barcode scanners to read the basic flight information, but scanners equipped with the appropriate security keys can authenticate the information and determine if the name, date, flight number or any other information has been changed. It’s simple but very effective. The net result will be a boarding pass that is extremely resistant to tampering or forgery…..”

Thanks to a cooperation with some airlines, TSA has launched eight test sites where passengers can receive boarding passes on their mobile phones or PDAs. (Here is a list of airports and airlines that are involved in the project).
These mobile boarding passes have digital signatures embedded in the barcodes. Officers who do the document checking are equipped with handheld barcode scanners and can confirm the authenticity of the boarding pass instantly.