Business Travel Tips

Hotel chain Best Western is to open the first two Best Western Premier hotels in Dubai next May.

For the first hotel, scheduled to open as Best Western Premier Dhow Palace on May 1, 2009, Best Western has rebranded the 282-rooms-and-suites Dhow Palace Hotel located in Bur Dubai.

Best Western will also brand a new-build deluxe Best Western Premier Creek, Bur Dubai. it also is scheduled to be open in May 2009.

Both hotels are located in the heart of Bur Dubai’s commercial district, at easy reach of the airport, World Trade Center, and Bur Juman Shopping Mall.

Travelocity.com eliminated booking fees on all airline tickets booked from now through May 31.

The last week Travelocity.com’s competitor Expedia.com had launched a similar free-booking promotion.

United Airlines is offering discount airfares on Business Class flights between Australia and U.S.

Business Class return flights from Sydney to Los Angeles start from as low as A$6876, from Melbourne to Los Angeles return from A$6859, including taxes, fees and surcharges.

United also offers discounts on Business Class flights departing Sydney and Melbourne to San Francisco, Chicago, and New York return.

Thanks to the latest upgrade, United Airlines Business Class offers 180 degrees, two metre long completely lie-flat seats as well as 150 hours of on-demand programming viewed on a 38cm wide screen.

To grab these deals you must book and buy the flights at least 90 days prior to departure. A A$250 fee will be charged for any changes before or after departure; surcharges apply for travel between Friday and Sunday.

A British consumer air travel group, Air Transport Users Council (AUC), said that more than 40 million bags were misplaced by the world’s airlines in 2007.

The Council also said the annual number of mishandled bags was rising and could be as high as 70 million by 2019.
Global travel solutions provider SITA says 1.2 pieces of luggage were lost permanently in 2007.

AUC says passengers are not fairly compensated for their lost luggage. They don’t get what they should from the carriers because they do not have receipts for the items that were in their bag or because the airline is taking into account depreciation of the value of the items in their bag.
AUC says airlines should reimburse travelers for all goods.

Under the new security program called “Secure Flights“, passengers soon will be also required to provide their birth date and their sex when making airline reservations. The information provided must exactly match the data on each traveler’s ID.
The program is part of aviation security enhancements the 9/11 Commission recommended.

As for privacy concerns, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials, who have the power of checking passenger names against watch lists, say that personal data will be held on file for no more than 7 days.

The new aviation security measures are expected to be introduced early this year on domestic flights and later in the year in international flights.

In order to collect more personal information, airlines are required to reprogram reservation systems making them incur an estimated $630 million in costs.

The “Secure Flights” program also aims to reduce the misidentification of innocent travelers who are mistakenly placed on “no-fly” lists because their names are similar to those found on watch lists. Thousands of incidents have been reported in which passengers have been barred from boarding flights because their names resembled the names of suspected terrorists. A situation the TSA calls “a frustratingly common occurrence.” (source)