Smooth Travel for Expats while Airlines are under Pressure
Airlines feel currently pressure from two sides at the same time: High fuel costs and demand slowing down. The European Union Carbon-Tax regime, trying to impose taxes on all global players in the air travel markets is adding even more pressure. On top of that comes a highly unpredictable economic environment where shocks with the potential to dwarf the Lehman collapse like a possible break-up of the Euro zone seem suddenly to be a real possibility.
Airlines are in Trouble
The airlines face the following challenges in that situation:
- Keep the flights full
- Avoid price wars
- Retain high service standards
- Reduce fuel consumption
Reducing fuel consumption demands a lot of investment spending to buy new planes and to improve fuel efficiency of older planes. And this in times of weakened banks and severe problems in the credit markets. All in all, this is not a time where you want to be an airline executive. But what does that mean for expats and people who have family relationships on more than one continent?
If you have family overseas and if you want to keep the relationships going, you cannot afford not to travel. On the other hand, you cannot hope that business travelers and tourists will fit the bill for higher costs alone, especially in times of slowing growth, low job security and high unemployment. But there are still good chances to find reasonable offers if you do some things right.
Stay Away from Peak Travel Days
Avoid high seasons like Christmas and summer vacations, if at all possible.
If you need to travel during high season, book early enough, but not too early. Most airlines have changed their rules, and they require now a payment and ticketing only almost immediately after a reservation is made. But if you book at the right time, you can still save several hundreds of Euros, especially compared to the prices of high-season-tickets a few days before the flight.
January and February are good months for buying summer vacation flight tickets, and for the Christmas season are February and March, or late summer good times to buy tickets.
Look Beyond Public Booking Engines
You should be aware, that for some destinations, especially in Africa and Asia, airlines create specials adapted to the needs of people visiting their relatives overseas. These special offers contain often better luggage allowances and some extra flexibility, e.g. the opportunity to rebook a flight after ticketing instead of a “no change, no refund” policy. Please be aware that those offers are typically not featured in public flight booking engines. Only selected travel agents receive special contracts from airlines to sell these tickets. The airlines do not pay commissions to their resellers. So the travel agent fee can undo the price advantage. But in this case you have still improved terms and someone who can assist you to change a flight if needed, while you are far away from the next airline branch office. So my advice is: Look for a travel agent who specializes in air tickets and whom you can trust, then build a long-term relationship with him.
If you are based in Germany, you may try as well our TailorMade TravelPlan
Traveling During Air Traffic Chaos
Almost every year sees a few days with severe air traffic chaos. Common causes are adverse weather conditions like fog, storm, ice and snow. Other reasons involve human action, like strikes of service personal or security regulations imposed by governments.
Incidents like the so called “volcano ashes flight ban” in Europe during the spring of 2010 are more severe than problems caused by weather conditions. A computer simulation signaled that time a high probability that dangerous particles stemming from a volcano in Iceland were present in the air. Obviously no government wanted to be responsible for a catastrophe caused by such particles. So they closed almost the complete European air space without any time frame for the end of the flight ban. After a number of days, and only in response to massive pressure from some of the biggest European airlines, governments bothered to check the real concentration of ashes in the air and reopened the air space gradually.
Pandemic diseases like SARS could also lead to such government actions. Riots may cause governments to close airspace and impede air travel as well. It is obvious, that air traffic chaos caused by political decisions is less predictable in scope and duration than problems resulting from weather conditions.
How to Protect Yourself?
What can you do to minimize the impact of such disruptions on you personally? You should take care of three aspects, which have a huge impact on your experience in case of travel chaos.
- While you book the flight:
If your journey runs smooth and without a problem, you do not need and will not miss a high quality score of your travel agency. You buy, pay and fly.
But whenever a disruption occurs, you will feel a big difference between an overwhelmed customer service hotline and personalized service provided by your travel agent who receives timely information from the airlines, together with specific rules about changing schedules and refunding canceled tickets affected by the chaos. You will be in a position to discuss your options with a personal travel consultant – if you have one – and then to reach an informed decision accommodating your needs as much as possible. - Before departure of your Flight:
You should try to confirm whether your plane will be flying on schedule before you go to the airport. In times of disruptions you should inquire already now about details and specific rules to postpone, reroute or cancel your flight. Then you decide what to do.
The same applies before departure of the return flight. Check out, whether your flight operates according to the schedule, before hitting the road to the airport. Weight your options and decide to take the return flight as booked, to rebook or to use another option e.g. traveling by car or train. If you decide to use your flight in spite of the disruption, it is always good advice to have everything you really need in your hand luggage. Otherwise it may happen that imortant items are stuck in a stranded box half a continent away. - If you are hit by air traffic chaos on the road:
From the moment you checked into your flight and received your boarding card, only the airline’s customer support staff can handle any inquiry. If you have missed a connection flight because the feeder flight was late, you need to contact the airline immediately and ask for a solution. They might offer a seat on another flight, possibly with another airline, or a hotel room and a seat one or more days later. Maybe you could finish your journey by rail, bus or car. In some cases the airline will even hire a taxi to bring you home.
The same applies, if your luggage is missing. If you do not find a service official of the airline, ask an airport employee for support.
In Short:
Obviously it is better to avoid being directly affected by air traffic chaos. But if you booked your ticket through a good travel agency, your travel consultant will be an important source of information and advice, allowing you to take informed decisions. If a problem occurs after you started your flight, you have to rely for solutions on airline service staff. Ask for help immediately after the problem occurs.
Travel Management Fundamentals
Some people may think that travel management is mainly concerned with negotiating discounts and other incentives while purchasing travel related services. Wrong!
What is then the meaning of term “travel management”? The concept is concerned with the optimal resource allocation related to business travel. The process starts with identifying the need for business trips and evaluating costs and benefits of individual trips. Large and medium sized businesses use a predetermined set of rules to evaluate the need for business trips and to categorize them.
Travel policies speed up the decision making process, provide transparency and provide a framework for effective delegation of booking decisions.
But every business, as small as it may be, should collect all information necessary for a meaningful cost-benefit analysis of a business trip. This is the only way for a business to ensure the right resource allocation to its travel needs. The same information helps to detect waste and to plan for an increase of resources, if needed.
Another task of any travel management system is the allocation of travel expenses to projects or customer relationships. This is a must, because otherwise it would be impossible to determine with certainty their profitability.
Only after these needs are satisfied, travel management has role in negotiating favorable terms and prices with service providers. The last step is then to book hotel rooms, air and train tickets, rental cars etc.
This is a very broad definition of the term “travel management”. Most travel managers will tell you that they do neither develop corporate travel policies nor do they evaluate the need of any business trip.
In a narrow sense travel management sorts the trips into predetermined categories. The travel manager organizes the trip then according to the rules laid out in the policies for the respective travel category. The information for accounting and controlling are generated automatically and transferred to the accounting department.
Accounting will sound an alert to a higher level of travel management as soon as certain events occur. This may be a significant rise of costs or the danger to overrun a budget. Another reason for an alarm may a big difference of costs between departments, which should be fairly similar. A sudden rise in costs for a single service category like hotels or flights may also trigger an alert. Upon such alerts a person on a higher level may analyze the reasons. He will check whether travel policies are correctly implemented and look into the need to adjust corporate policies.
There is another important benefit provided by a professionally organized travel management process: Detailed and up-to-date information is always available, if a need arises to evaluate the profitability of a project or customer relationship. The same data provide also a point of reference about travel related costs when the company prepares an offer for a new project or negotiates a new contract with a customer.
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Hotel Reservations Guide
Do you need hotel reservations for places you have never seen before? It will be easy to book a hotel in that town. But what about a decent hotel: clean, in a safe environment, quiet? Or close to the airport, business center, exhibition ground? That can be more challenging.
Ask Your Contact
Chances are that you know somebody living at the place you are going to visit. If that is true, you can ask your contact to book a decent hotel for you. Communicate clearly, what kind of hotel you are looking for. Otherwise it could happen that you find yourself in the perfect hotel, but way out of your budget. Or you could end up in a hotel with quite reasonable rates, but lacking services like internet access or sport facilities. That can be annoying and expensive if you need them.
Always Book Hotels in Advance
If you do not have the luxury to ask a contact person familiar with your travel destination for a recommendation, you have other options.
- You can do a web search for hotels at your travel destination, and give the hotel you chose a call.
- A huge variety of hotel booking websites is at your service.
- If you do not want to waste your time with researching hotels through the internet, use your travel agent.
Important thing: Do an advance reservation. Do not travel and look for a hotel after you reached your destination, if you are not keen to pay the highest available rate the hotel has listed. Hotel owners know that it is expensive and time consuming to shop for a room to stay, if you are a stranger in a city. If you want to get a reasonable room for a reasonable price, you must do hotel reservations before you travel.
Hotel Booking Websites
Hotel booking services through the web will offer you many different hotels, ranging from the budget hotel in the industrial area outside the city up to the prestigious and comfortable 5-star hotel at the best available location. If you are looking for a decently priced hotel with standard facilities and services, and you are not travelling to the center of nowhere, a hotel booking website can be a perfect option.
For most hotel reservations you should enter your credit card information as a guarantee. This way you keep your room when you arrive late. If you do not show up, they will charge you one night. A reservation without guarantee will usually be canceled, if you did not arrive by 6 p.m. There is no cancellation fee without payment guarantee, but neither a room if you arrive late.
Special Offers and Booking through Tour Operators
For some special offers or during peak seasons like trade exhibitions or holidays there may a cancellation fee, and a deadline after which you cannot cancel your room. If you book your hotel through a tour operator as part of a vacation package, you may also face restrictive cancel policies. As usual: Check the fine print.
Luxury Hotels
If you look for your favorite luxury hotel in a booking engine, you may or may not find it. The very best hotels provide not only superb locations and excellent services. They are also choosy about their guests and use a very high published price as a first filter to keep unwanted persons away. References, e.g. via corporate contracts, can earn you a steep discount in the luxury hotel segment. If the hotel knows you already as a customer in good standing, you may also enjoy a steep discount from the published rack rates.
Some travel websites demand a best price guarantee from the hotels listed in their system. A manager who wants to hand-pick his hotel guests has a hard time to allow a booking agency any influence on his pricing policies. My advice: If you need hotel reservations for the luxury segment, use your corporate travel department or a travel agent who has access your corporate rate. If that is not possible, go for the low tech way and give your chosen hotel a call to ask for a room.
