Traveling For Business

It is a cold blooded secret which Scott Eblin carries with himself. Scott pens the popular blog for Government Executive, Executive Coach. The secret is that Scott is religious business traveler. He can’t control his business travel instincts even when his family goes for a vacation. He confuses the entire family with his aimless wandering and moving to the unknown only to leave his family and kids extremely bored. While his kids get more interested in the junk food and funky stores, he prefers to brush his shoulders with the non-entities.

Scott, however, is more cautious now every time he goes for a vacation with his family as his better half has threatened him of physical damage if he does not take it easy while on a holiday. That is what inspired him to put pen to paper a few tips for his fellow business travelers while on a family vacation.
One should not opt for lace-ups while choosing the shoe for going to the airport. The best way to put sandals on as it will make the entire process faster. Socks are highly recommended even though they look quite silly with sandals as they might come handy if you have to walk barefoot in the airport.

One should have a cautious look for about 15 feet ahead so that one can spot people. Every oblivious business traveler makes this mistake while on a family vacation. You must be aware whom to stop at and whom to avoid while on a vacation with the family.

The entire side-splitting blog leaves no chance to laugh aloud in deed.

Most of the business travelers who move frequently to various places develop a liking for out of the ordinary signs. The worldwide popularity of the English language is, however, yet to execute the proper usage of the language on a global level. Recently the New York Times caught the attention of many by pointing out Shanghai’s earnest endeavor to wipe off the embarrassing usage of wrong English all over the city.

Now the city has got a team of adept English speakers and 600 volunteers to fix public signs which goes beyond 10,000 in number. These public signs will be rewritten in proper English and try to establish a better image of the city in front of the skillful English speaking travelers.

The campaign is supposedly inspired by Beijing’s mammoth effort to correct the entire set of signs all over the city on the occasion of the Summer Olympics in 2008. It eventually replaced more than 400,000 signs on the street and more than 1300 menus in the city restaurants. Racist Park is now known as Minorities Park and Dongda Anus Hospital is now called Dongda Proctology Hospital.

The function of using signs is not to be funny but to be functional. However, signage is a source of fun for many people. If Shanghai successfully wipes all the weird signs off the city, the humorists will find it difficult to find another source of inspiration, it seems.

A new trend is emerging where companies are offering their employees cash in return for choosing to travel by economy class. No such a good news for airline companies who are already facing tough times, but many companies are beginning to see this kind of incentives for their employees little trouble i.e. compensating with money for a little or a lot of adjustment. Most of the time the cash awarded is equal to the difference between an economy ticket and business class ticket. Many people complain that this is an overblown story and no companies are offering except a few. But the same article has been published in the TIME magazine where an energizer employee has confirmed its company’s habit of giving cash in return for travelling economy class. Even if they weren’t till the article in TIME I am sure they will start now after a popular magazine like TIME’s publishing of something like this. This is not only bad news for airline companies, but it will also lead to higher taxes for the employee.

Employees get paid up to $2,000 for a little trouble they undergo which can go up to $3,000 for long distance trips.

Google has dipped its toes in yet another unfamiliar territory and this time it is the online ticket booking sector.  The search giant has purchased the ITA software for processing flight info that will benefit the end traveler to get better priced tickets and availability of tickets. This deal will take Google in the online ticket booking and purchase sector and only time will tell what new additions Google will make to give us a much better online ticket shopping experience.

The ITA software is also used by the online ticket sellers such as Orbitz and Kayak, which will lead to them feeling the heat of the competition increasing.  The deal will have to be first approved by the regulatory bodies. Google is looking at the vast untapped market that is still undeveloped and needs a lot of patching to be done. Most of Google’s takeovers have ended up creating something new and everyone will be waiting with excitement to see what Google comes up with.

In Business travelling really necessary? This question is becoming asked more and more because of the affordable technological advances nowadays. The low cost options that businesses have nowadays are making things a little more difficult for the boss to decide between travelling or go with the cheaper option.

But the problem with using technologies such as skype, video conferencing, instant messaging are substituting travel to a certain level but these technologies can never replace air travel in anyway. You do not get the sense of actually meeting someone and getting a deal made with someone. Take Skype for instance, it can connect a person working from home with his boss at the other side of the country or in a different state and removing the part of stressful travel but it still makes actual meeting necessary. The video conferencing can never substitute for actual meeting in person. On the other had the online collaboration tool such as Google Docs can raise the question are offices really necessary since you can have a similar effect on the productivity and co-operation by using these docs for m the comfort of your home.

But the fact is that the modern technologies are making a huge difference in many industries where the need of something like this is necessary and but there are many businesses that require actually business travel and they can only use these technologies as substitutes.

It is a imagined that many business travelers share hotel rooms on business trips or at least try to share the costs of a room with his fellow co-traveler on a business trip. This survey was done by the Embassy Suites hotel chain and the distinction here is made between trying and actually doing it.

It is something that I would not too fond of, but it is very popular among cheap bosses who want to save money on overseas accommodation costs while traveling for business. It is also a strategy of companies to cut costs.

Sharing a room comes with its own problems like privacy. Privacy is the biggest issue while sharing a room with a co-worker. Seeing your co-worker all the time in a business suit and seeing him in his boxers can be very uncomfortable. It is not possible to rest, relax and let your internal guard down, since it feels like you are still in office.  There are many ways of cutting costs like choosing economy lass instead of business, trains instead of airplanes and even cheaper hotels, but the practice of making them share rooms instead is very inefficient.

It is turning out to be a huge debate over the banning or not about the serving of peanuts over commercial flights. A new set of proposals by the Transportation Department has sparked this peanutty debate.

The ban is being pushed for that little number of travelers who are allergic to peanuts. These few passengers are the cause for an outright ban for something which is synonymous with air travel. There have been suggestions for creating peanut free zones in planes and banning peanuts in flights which has at least one passenger allergic to peanuts. But finally the decision comes down to the airline provider over serving of peanuts or not. Thou the banning of peanuts will not be a huge inconvenience to anyone; still a decision like this should be taken seriously. Even banning peanuts from being server does not mean passengers who are not allergic to peanuts will not bring peanuts of their own and cause problems to people who are allergic to peanuts, and banning peanuts from airports is not ethical since it is not a banned food. Hence the only harsh and possible decision to make is the provision of masks, meditation and other things that can prevent the allergic person from getting allergic reaction on the flight.

Hence a fair decision needs to be taken which is good for the co-existence of the passengers in the metal tube hanging miles above the land.

After the never ending recession, the airline industry which saw some of the worst days is going in for a profitable year in 2010. The international air Transport Association announced tat the world airlines industry to show positive profits this year.

This will come as very good news for hard hit airlines who have failed to see any profits in the past 2 years and are falling apart. But a few airlines like the European airlines will be falling back because of the losses it experienced during the recent flight cancellations due to the volcanic ash and the employee strikes. The international air Transport Association announced that the global airline industry will obtain a 2.5 billion dollar in 2010 as opposed to the 2.8 billion dollar loss in the previous year. The airline passenger traffic is expected to grow -7.1 percent and the cargo volumes are projected to grow 18.5 percent.

The Asian airlines are expected to post the biggest profits this year of which the airlines from the gulf region like the Emirates are projected to be with the highest margins this year. The asia –Pacific and North American airlines are supposed to bounce back in a big way with reversed figures from the last year. But this recovery is very fragile and depends on the imbalances going on in the European and American economies.