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Car Rental Safety During Traveling
What do I need to do before I leave the rental lot?
You're in a big hurry now that you're got the car, but take a
few minutes to familiarize yourself with this new car. Check the
car for interior or exterior damage. Find the lights,...
Four Ways to Free/Low Cost Travel
1. Free lodging!
Find a pen friend. Maybe you haven’t thought of this. It’s the best solution to your budget problems, but you can’t have it overnight! Greek people are hospitable and so are other countries’ people if you become friends with....
Health Insurance for Canada Travel
While we as U.S. residents think often about travel insurance coverage when we're traveling overseas we're not so quick to worry about health insurance for Canada travel. This is especially true if our voyage to Canadian provinces is by car and not...
Tips for Travelers Who are Going to Hong Kong
Hong Kong is a key destination for many travelers. It has a
population of more than seven million, scattered all throughout
its more than 200 islands. It is located in Eastern Asia, near
China and the South China Sea. Formerly, leased to...
Travel Insurance Bargains for Brits
If you're traveling in the UK, or a UK citizen traveling elsewhere, you have many options including full year travel insurance. While the occasional traveler such as a vacationer may not find full year travel insurance preferable to the one-trip...
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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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