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.

Social sites such as facebook, myspace and orkut are nowadays being used to plan business trips by Chinese and other business travelers form non-Europe and non-American countries.

A recent survey carried out by Travelport found out that Chinese, Indian and Hong Kong’s business travelers use the assistance of their social networks to research business travel. They also use the same social networks for leisure travel information digging. With almost 400 million social networking site users in China, a significant amount of travel information can be found out by just asking and looking around. This coupled with online travel forum discussions help the travelers to plan their trip accordingly and avoid any hassles. Local social networking sites such as Renren are more popular than international social sites in china and a carrier such as Lufthansa is looking ways to partner with these sites to increase its revenue. These Chinese travelers look for good bargains and take over an opportunity if it seems cheap almost certainly.

Hence these travelers from Asian countries are slowly changing the face of the international business travel and only time will tell what new venture comes forth in the arena of business travel.

A business traveler has to go from one flight on to hotel and from there may be to another hotel or a fight. In this process, the traveler is faced with an array of taxes which change from one hotel to another hotel. Most of these taxes go un-noticed but when a few do get notices, they raise questions about the need of unnecessary taxes on a business traveler.

A lot of American states and localities are nowadays charging business travelers an array of different taxes. One such ridiculous tax is the Bed tax. Along with this is the usual five % state tax, a 3 % municipal tax, a room tax, a hotel tax and many more such taxes. A process of tax shifting takes place regularly depending upon the demand of rooms. But not much can be done by business travelers to object paying these takes because they are in an hurry and need to get rid of these burdens and get home as soon as possible or to the next business location. Hence the belief of the local authorities to rip off travelling business men of whatever they can is base on the highway toll system to reduce traffic

Airport security is getting a new kind of weapon since last 4 years. But this not a new kind of x-ray scanner or body image capturing device. The American Transport-Security-Administration has been training somewhere around 3000 employees to spot potential terrorists throughout the airport.

This programme is known as Screening Passengers by observation Technique abbreviated as SPOT. This technique is developed based on a report in Nature magazine by Sharon Weinberger. This allows the airport security to notice terrorists based on tiny facial features. But there is no proof that this technique actually works and the chance of it being right are same as flipping a coin. This is being regarded as a pseudoscience and needs to be validated first before putting it to practice and adding increased pressure on already stressed out travelers. Although this technique is being used by the Israeli airport authorities since years, this still needs valid scientific proof of actually producing positive outcomes. The psychology professor Paul Ekman who formulated this technique and now trains security guards to spot terrorists does not think a scientific proof is necessary for this technique. But the fact is that this technique has not helped in capturing any real terrorists till its inception 4 years ago and only resulted in harassment of passengers and missing their flights.

The gulf airway business is booming like anything in these times of recession. Some of the best known airlines like Etihad, Emirates and Qatar airlines benefit a lot from the government policies, clear management and the location of their home hubs, the strategic location they are place from where they can either fly to the east or to the west or from west to east, they give the customers an easy choice. There is a dire need of space in the eastern airports of Europe, America and the Far East.

The increased air traffic in the gulf is being handled by the gulf airports with ease and the capacity to handle flights is steadily increasing that of their western and eastern counterparts. And it is predicted that this boundary will be crossed within 3 years and the gulf airports will be the largest traffic handling airports in the world. That and the fact that the Dubai airport will become the world’s largest airport with the building of the 5 runway airport with an yearly passenger transit of 160 million. Ant the fact that the east and the west can be connected by the long range flights by a single stop in the middle east is reason enough for the gulf airline sector to flourish more faster than any other airline.

It is well know that aircrafts will be cancelled in cases such as bad weather, crowded runaways and other such instances where the aircraft carrier makes the choice of grounding an airline. It is hard for the travelers whose flight got cancelled to keep guessing what the reason for the axing of their flight was. In comparison the ash plumes emitted from the Icelandic volcano seemed civilized in cancelling flights all over Europe together.

Most of the time the exact reason for the cancellation of a flight is not publicized, but still many “researchers” i.e. travelers have decoded many of the reasons behind these actions. It is known that flights that are not completely filled are the first flights are the first ones to get cancelled and slight disruption in weather will get it cancelled. The second flights that mostly get cancelled are the ones that travel on the route which has more number of flights, so that one or two flights if cancelled, the other flights can take in the stranded passengers. Another more alarming reason is the price of the tickets that one has paid for travelling, the routes with high cost tickets are least to get axed as compared to low cost routes. Hence prioritization takes place due to these following reasons.