Technology
Best Practices
“Have Laptop Will Travel”
By Mark Regan
Published: June / July 2008
Maybe it is just nostalgia, but travel used to be a more
straightforward affair. (It was also more comfortable in
many ways, but I doubt I need to detail those.) You
would call the airline, buy a ticket, step off at the
gate and your loved ones would be waiting.
My, how times have changed. Now there are travel sites
to help you find the best fare, airlines like Southwest
that allow you sit wherever you want, extensive security
stuff which means you get to the airport earlier and
probably sit longer…the obviously necessary changes
borne from evolution of the traveling population.
Which begs the question: what is worth knowing about?
Given how un-amusing travel can be nowadays, it might
not feel like much. There are a few diamonds in the
rough, however, that still bring some creature comforts
to the travel entanglements many of us deal with as we
travel for business. Take the effort that Orbitz.com has
put into personalizing the experience by harnessing the
finer points of Web 2.0 technology: community building.
On the Orbitz site, there is a service called OrbitzTLC
which offers more information than you can probably
imagine on most of the large airports here in the U.S.
Choosing one from the dropdown immediately gives you
blog postings, forum postings by other travelers from
everything about good places for loved ones to wait, to
the hidden nook for a bite to eat. It displays a
dashboard with the airport status, traffic, and security
wait times. All of these update in real-time, making it
a nice-to-have tool to glance at before leaving to brave
the airport.
Their TLC service doesn’t stop at just those kinds of
goodies. When you book your ticket you can enter in
email addresses or phone numbers of people expecting you
so they will receive any notifications about flight
delays or cancellations. This saves you a lot of phone
calls if you find yourself standing at the customer
service desk.
Speaking of getting settled in at the airport, wireless
Internet is standard in all major metropolitan airports
nowadays. There are some that provide it free of charge,
but they tend to be the smaller ones. The larger
airports easily monetize the boredom we all face while
we sit at the gate, unable to have a friend or loved one
there with us anymore to keep us company. Most airports
use the T-Mobile HotSpot system to let you get hooked
into the connection, which generally runs about $10 for
a “day pass”….something that seems a little frustrating
given that you are probably only there for a few hours
at most.
If you find your fingers itching to start surfing the
‘net the second you sit down, you might want to check
out Verizon’s FiOS card. This little device acts as a
portable wireless connection for your computer that will
work virtually anywhere it can access Verizon’s network.
It plugs into the side of your laptop, searches for the
signal, and you are connected! Granted, it is not going
to be quite as fast as what you are used to with your
home connection, but it is still pretty impressive.
(Incidentally, this is also a nice-to-have item if you
are stuck as a passenger in a long cab ride to the
airport or sitting on the tarmac.) There are multiple
modems available, and Verizon usually runs some kind of
rebate/free offer on the device itself with a
predetermined contract length. There is a monthly access
fee associated with it, but if you travel a lot and find
yourself connecting at two or more airports on just one
leg of the trip, the savings wind up being significant.
Sure, travel used to be simpler. There were fancier
accommodations and the help was much happier. As we keep
regressing into our little Internet worlds where we
socialize less to get more information, travel is one
industry that certainly has not missed that boat.
Mark Regan is the CEO and
founder of Flat World Media, an online marketing firm
specializing in optimizing the online customer
relationship through proven data-driven strategies.
Based in Tampa, he blogs at
www.TheInnovationScout.com.
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