Business Travel Tips

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection is planning to expand Global Entry, the program enabling international travelers arriving in the U.S. to get faster U.S. Customs clearance at kiosks.

The USA Today writes that Alan Bersin, Customs and Border Protection commissioner, hopes to increase membership to 100,000 by the end of the year. Applicants pay a one-time $100 fee.

- How Global Entry works
The process requires participants to present their machine-readable U.S. passport or permanent resident card, submit their fingerprints for biometric verification, and make a customs declaration at the kiosk’s touch-screen. Upon successful completion of the Global Entry process at the kiosk, the traveler is issued a transaction receipt and directed to baggage claim and the exit, unless chosen for a selective or random secondary referral.

Details about the program are available on the Global Entry website.

Hong Kong carrier Cathay Pacific is offering discounted fares for flights to New Zealand and Australia from London Heathrow via Hong Kong.

Below are examples of some fares included in the Cathay Pacific’s promotion. The fares are for return flights in Economy Class and include taxes, fees and surcharges.

- London Heathrow-Auckland from £799;
- London Heathrow-Sydney from £789;
- London Heathrow-Melbourne from £789;
- London Heathrow-Brisbane from £789.

Booking must be made by July 30.
Travel period: between November 1st and 30, 2010 and between April 26 to May 31, 2011.
Offer details can be found at CathayPacific.com.

Most of corporate travel managers lament that they have no idea what the real cost of airplane tickets is going to be when booking air travel.

The New York Times writes that the extra fees that managed travel systems generally do not show when companies buy airline tickets, can increase the cost of a flight 25 percent or even far more.

“Companies negotiate overall discounts annually with various airlines but then use managed travel systems, which work with huge reservation systems called global distribution systems, to book the tickets. Those systems generally show the fares but not all the extra fees for various services like checked bags [...] Fees do add up. In the first quarter of this year, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics at the Transportation Department, airlines took in $768 million in fees for checked bags alone.”

The New York Times says that the Business Travel Coalition plans to testify before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s aviation subcommittee to emphasize that travel managers want federal regulations to force airlines to become more open about fees on all reservations systems, not just their own Web sites.

The Department of Transportation has released statistics showing the dramatically increase in flight cancellations.

The flight cancellations for May increased about 30% from the same month last year.
At the same time, the consumer complaints against U.S. airlines rose 23%, with most of it due to canceled flights.

With the recently introduced federal penalties — in effect from April 29 — for airlines that strand passengers on delayed flights for more than three hours, the increased cancellations may be partly the result of airlines trying to avoid the fines, that are as high as $27,500 per passenger.

However, the Department of Transportation has also adopted rules that require airlines that bump passengers to increase the compensation to as much as $1,300 per ticket, depending on how long the passenger must wait for the next flight, up from $800 currently. (source)

A privacy advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., the Electronic Privacy Information Center, has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to block the full body scanners at the airports.

The USA Today quotes Marc Rotenberg, president of EPIC says as saying: “the program is unlawful, invasive, and ineffective [...] the body scanners are highly invasive and are applied to all air travelers without any particular suspicion.”

However the program’s proponents argue that the TSA limits the number of officers who can see the images and separates the officers looking at images from the passengers being screened. The scanners also use software to blur the faces on the images. (source).