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Is Purchasing Travel Insurance Smart?
To answer the question "is purchasing travel insurance smart?" let's look at what insurance is. When you purchase insurance - health insurance, homeowner's insurance, car insurance, life insurance, or travel insurance - you're not making an...
Planning For Road Trip Travel
Whether you are a seasoned pro or a novice newcomer to the world of interstate travel, planning a road trip can be more time-intensive than you think. If you are about to embark on a cross country adventure or a coastal tour of the Atlantic, there...
Playing Your Cards Right -- Tips for Traveling with Credit Cards
Using credit cards while traveling is a good idea for a number of reasons:
You have a record of your expenditures for record-keeping and tax purposes (especially important if you travel for business)
You may get a better exchange...
Top Travel Reservation Tips For A Stress-Free Trip!
Anyone who wants to enjoy a stress-free trip has to start with
the basic concern of any traveler - how to effectively handle
travel reservations. Below are a number of advice that may help:
- Decide on a travel plan - specific destination,...
What to Pack for Travel: The Essentials of Business Travel Packing
Knowing what to pack for travel can make for a
smooth transition from one work location to the next. The
essentials of business travel packing take into consideration
all of the possible events that you may need to attend while
also realizing...
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Will You Be a Trusted Traveler?
Editor: The following article is offered for your free use providing the Resource Box at the end is included.
WILL YOU BE A TRUSTED TRAVELER?
By Laura Quarantiello
© Tiare Publications
404 words
Security checkpoints have become a genuine pain for air travelers. Where once you could breeze right through the
x-ray scanner and head for the boarding gate, now you must endure careful checks of your carry-on luggage and perhaps even of your person. It's the legacy of September 11th and a
necessary step toward keeping air travelers safe. But the delays are increasing and passengers are grumbling. Frequent flyers,especially, are complaining about the slowdown and the hassle caused by long security lines.
Enter the Trusted Traveler program, the brainchild of an airline industry committee working on ways to improve airport security. With Trusted Traveler, anyone who wanted to forgo long airport security lines would authorize the government to conduct a
background check and take their thumbprint or an iris scan of their
eyes. Once cleared, they would receive an identification card encrypted with their "biometric ID." Airports would have reserved checkpoints where passengers could present their card, have their fingerprint or iris scan matched to the card's information, and be passed through to the boarding area. This type of prescreening would reduce lengthy lines and let frequent travelers avoid much of the current airport hassle. "From my perspective, it makes
more sense to subject the people I know a lot about to a lesser degree of security and the people I don't know anything about to a greater
degree of security. It just makes a lot of sense to spend the finite amount of security resources we have on the folks who are unknown," says Dirk C. McMahon, Northwest Airlines Senior Vice President for Customer Service.
Experts say that the Trusted Traveler program won't appeal to everyone. Those who fly infrequently won't need to go through the rigorous background checks necessary to be labeled a trusted
traveler, and those with something to hide or those with concerns about privacy won't want the government checking their bona fides. For frequent travelers, however, the program could mean valuable minutes saved, hassles avoided, and a smoother airport experience.
For now the program is just an idea; the Air Transport Association is working on a proposal for the Transportation Security Administration and the Homeland Security Department that it hopes will put a 90-day pilot project at Northwest and Midwest Express using already-screened airline personnel into operation by the end of the year. If all goes according to plan, the Trusted Traveler program could be in place at Northwest
by mid-2003.
(end)
About the Author
Laura Quarantiello is a freelancewriter specializing in air traveland the airline industry. She is the author of “Air-Ways:The Insider’s Guide to Air Travel.
http://www.tiare.com/airways.htm
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