The National Business Travel Association - which tracks developments in transport in the United States and advocates for industry stakeholders - just issued a report card for U.S. President Barack Obama. Obama's grade: a less than inspiring C+, just about average.
To put matters into perspective: Obama has held office for just a year, and he has a lot on his plate: global warming, war and peace, the national and global economy and more. Moreover, the NBTA is just one group. But it is a well-informed and attentive group, and the organization's assessment of what Obama's doing and not doing is worth taking seriously.
The administration's highest grade - an A - comes on infrastructure, due mostly to the $8 billion Obama has pledged for much-needed, long-delayed high-speed rail projects. It's great to see the U.S. take a leaf from Japan, China and Europe's book and pay attention to rail again, but airports, highways, bridges, tunnels and other essential pieces of travel infrastructure need serious tending to, as well.
At the other end of the grading system, the administration gets an F for not actively supporting long-term funding for an updated, next-generation air traffic control system at the always-stressed Federal Aviation Administration. It gets an incomplete for White House efforts on energy and climate change.
Other grades fall in-between the very top and the very bottom. There's a B+ for airline performance and aviation congestion - but some perspective is needed there, too. On-time flights and congestion have improved marginally in the U.S. due to the simple fact that fewer people are flying into the headwinds of the Great Recession. The real test will come when travelers return to the sky and the road as the recession finally winds down.
Michael W. McCormick, the NBTA's executive director and chief operating officer, sums things up this way:
"The refusal of our government to prioritize the modernization of our aviation system is a significant failure. Our economy relies heavily on the efficiency of air travel. In fact, business travel alone contributes $260 billion to the U.S. economy. We've found that investment in business travel could lead to the creation of millions of new jobs.''
One could add the fact that these aren't solely American issues. The U.S. has the largest air traffic system in the world. What happens in the U.S. has major consequences for travel everywhere. Let's hope Obama earns a steadily rising grade in the years to come.
Showing posts with label National Business Travel Association. Show all posts
Showing posts with label National Business Travel Association. Show all posts
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Monday, October 5, 2009
Two Blasts from the Past
Not too long ago, two ideas that have been kicking around in the United States for years - an airline passengers' bill of rights and a registered traveler program - were all but given up for dead. Now, both ideas have resurfaced, with a passengers' bill of rights gaining traction and some form of RT program getting another look.
A passenger bill of rights has been batted around since at least 1999, when numerous flight delays and cancellations raised the ire of travelers and attracted the attention of the U.S. Congress. Airlines vowed to fix the problems on their own. But they haven't. Six hundred thirteen flights were trapped on the tarmac for three hours or more during the first six months of 2009, according to Department of Transportation statistics. About 100,000 travelers a year are stranded on the tarmac, where they can be left without adequate food, water or ventilation.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sen. Olympia Snow (R-Maine) are sponsoring passengers' rights legislation written into the Senate bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration. Boxer last month told a private stakeholders' meeting sponsored by the Business Travel Coalition and Flyersrights.org that federal regulation is all but certain. The Boxer-Snowe bill would allow passengers held on the tarmac to deplane after three hours so long as the captain thought it was safe.
The question underlying this idea - and it would have to be harmonized with a similar bill from the House of Representatives - is whether it would actually work. Airlines hate the idea of being told how to run their operations and warn of dire unintended consequences. We can say this is self-serving, but some academic observers of the travel industry lend a degree of support to the carriers, saying that a three-hour rule would only affect a small number of delayed flights.
The airlines, for their part, argue that delayed flights are statistically insignificant anyway. But this is tone-deaf when it comes to customer relations. I was once held on a plane on the tarmac for six hours at Frankfurt airport during a snowstorm in Germany, and it was agonizing, despite the fact that the carrier, United Airlines, fed everyone and even showed a movie. Statistics are cold comfort when you are one of the statistics.
The registered - or 'trusted' - traveler idea has been discussed ever since the 2001 terrorist attacks using hijacked aircraft in the United States. The first RT program - Verified Identity Pass, Inc., known as Clear - didn't get up and running until 2005. It signed up 200,000 customers at about $200 U.S. per pop, but couldn't make a commercial go of it, suspending operations this past June. By that time, the U.S. Transportation Security Adminstration, deciding the programs - which were supposed to vet travelers by checking criminal records and using biometrics - had no security value. Indeed, Clear and two small rivals were basically airport concierge services, taking members to the head of the security line, where they then had to take off their belts and shoes and take out their laptops like everyone else.
Now, though, major organizations such as the National Business Travel Association are urging a revival and expansion of RT programs, and an investment bank, Henry, Inc., is bidding to buy the assets of Verified Identity Pass. Testifying last week before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, the NBTA's executive director, Michael W. McCormick, called for creation of a next generation of voluntary RT programs, to speed carefully vetted frequent travelers through inconsistent and vexing airport security.
The devil - as we are forever reminded - is in the details. And what eventually emerges from the Capitol Hill maw, if anything does, will be nothing if not detailed. Whether these old ideas will give travel a new face in the U.S. is far from certain, but these once-dead notions are showing intriguing signs of life.
A passenger bill of rights has been batted around since at least 1999, when numerous flight delays and cancellations raised the ire of travelers and attracted the attention of the U.S. Congress. Airlines vowed to fix the problems on their own. But they haven't. Six hundred thirteen flights were trapped on the tarmac for three hours or more during the first six months of 2009, according to Department of Transportation statistics. About 100,000 travelers a year are stranded on the tarmac, where they can be left without adequate food, water or ventilation.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sen. Olympia Snow (R-Maine) are sponsoring passengers' rights legislation written into the Senate bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration. Boxer last month told a private stakeholders' meeting sponsored by the Business Travel Coalition and Flyersrights.org that federal regulation is all but certain. The Boxer-Snowe bill would allow passengers held on the tarmac to deplane after three hours so long as the captain thought it was safe.
The question underlying this idea - and it would have to be harmonized with a similar bill from the House of Representatives - is whether it would actually work. Airlines hate the idea of being told how to run their operations and warn of dire unintended consequences. We can say this is self-serving, but some academic observers of the travel industry lend a degree of support to the carriers, saying that a three-hour rule would only affect a small number of delayed flights.
The airlines, for their part, argue that delayed flights are statistically insignificant anyway. But this is tone-deaf when it comes to customer relations. I was once held on a plane on the tarmac for six hours at Frankfurt airport during a snowstorm in Germany, and it was agonizing, despite the fact that the carrier, United Airlines, fed everyone and even showed a movie. Statistics are cold comfort when you are one of the statistics.
The registered - or 'trusted' - traveler idea has been discussed ever since the 2001 terrorist attacks using hijacked aircraft in the United States. The first RT program - Verified Identity Pass, Inc., known as Clear - didn't get up and running until 2005. It signed up 200,000 customers at about $200 U.S. per pop, but couldn't make a commercial go of it, suspending operations this past June. By that time, the U.S. Transportation Security Adminstration, deciding the programs - which were supposed to vet travelers by checking criminal records and using biometrics - had no security value. Indeed, Clear and two small rivals were basically airport concierge services, taking members to the head of the security line, where they then had to take off their belts and shoes and take out their laptops like everyone else.
Now, though, major organizations such as the National Business Travel Association are urging a revival and expansion of RT programs, and an investment bank, Henry, Inc., is bidding to buy the assets of Verified Identity Pass. Testifying last week before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, the NBTA's executive director, Michael W. McCormick, called for creation of a next generation of voluntary RT programs, to speed carefully vetted frequent travelers through inconsistent and vexing airport security.
The devil - as we are forever reminded - is in the details. And what eventually emerges from the Capitol Hill maw, if anything does, will be nothing if not detailed. Whether these old ideas will give travel a new face in the U.S. is far from certain, but these once-dead notions are showing intriguing signs of life.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Travel and Taxes
Are taxes levied specifically on hotel room bills, airlines, car rentals and other travel-related things discriminatory? And are they by nature illegitimate and downright nasty?
Such are the implications of a new report jointly produced by a foundation linked to the National Business Travel Association (http://www.nbta.org/) and the employee travel spending tracker Concur and released by the NBTA this week at its annual meeting in San Diego. While both travel prices and tax revenue - general sales tax and travel-specific taxes - have fallen due to plummeting business and leisure travel and cautious consumer spending, the NBTA report warns that travel costs for Americans will rocket back up when the recession ends.
Fay Beauchine, chair of the NBTA Foundation, said in a prepared statement that "Taxes increased and more were implemented across the United States to make up for government revenue shortfalls during the recession. So, when the economy recovers, travelers will take a double hit of rising prices and exploding taxes...''.
This, the foundation clearly believes, will be a bad thing.
Will it? Does it matter what those taxes are used for? If we want things like roads and bridges that don't collapse, fire and police protection. airports that aren't falling apart, or music classes in schools, and - oh, the arts - it may indeed be necessary to hoist what the foundation calls "a discriminatory tax burden'' on our frail shoulders.
Consider the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, to cite one example. Instituted in 1961 and now notched at 14 percent of visitors' hotel bills, tax revenue from hotel room rentals in San Francisco - a tourist town where tourism is the largest industry - has for 48 years funneled millions to worthy and often-needy recipients in the city.
Among other things, the hotel tax supports Grants for the Arts (www.sfgfta.org/grants), a San Francisco city agency that in the 2008-09 fiscal year awarded $11.5 million to 231 groups and activities inside the San Francisco city limits. Cultural institutions as august as the San Francisco Opera, as festive and fun as the St. Patrick's Day and Carnaval parades and as grassroots-minded as neighborhood arts centers have found good things to do with the money.
Why shouldn't visitors help to keep those ventures alive? Local residents need and want them, and a good many travelers flock to San Francisco for its high culture and edgy arts scene, cultural diversity and offbeat energy. Travel-related taxes in turn help nourish the attractions that draw those visitors, joining travel and taxation in a feedback loop.
Look, no one deeply loves paying taxes, and opposition to taxes of any kind is a quasi-religious tenet in the United States, I realize. But if Americans want the cultural depth and richness of Europe and the 21st century infrastructure of Japan and parts of fast-developing China and the Middle East, the money has to come from somewhere.
Travel can and should pay its fair share.
Such are the implications of a new report jointly produced by a foundation linked to the National Business Travel Association (http://www.nbta.org/) and the employee travel spending tracker Concur and released by the NBTA this week at its annual meeting in San Diego. While both travel prices and tax revenue - general sales tax and travel-specific taxes - have fallen due to plummeting business and leisure travel and cautious consumer spending, the NBTA report warns that travel costs for Americans will rocket back up when the recession ends.
Fay Beauchine, chair of the NBTA Foundation, said in a prepared statement that "Taxes increased and more were implemented across the United States to make up for government revenue shortfalls during the recession. So, when the economy recovers, travelers will take a double hit of rising prices and exploding taxes...''.
This, the foundation clearly believes, will be a bad thing.
Will it? Does it matter what those taxes are used for? If we want things like roads and bridges that don't collapse, fire and police protection. airports that aren't falling apart, or music classes in schools, and - oh, the arts - it may indeed be necessary to hoist what the foundation calls "a discriminatory tax burden'' on our frail shoulders.
Consider the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, to cite one example. Instituted in 1961 and now notched at 14 percent of visitors' hotel bills, tax revenue from hotel room rentals in San Francisco - a tourist town where tourism is the largest industry - has for 48 years funneled millions to worthy and often-needy recipients in the city.
Among other things, the hotel tax supports Grants for the Arts (www.sfgfta.org/grants), a San Francisco city agency that in the 2008-09 fiscal year awarded $11.5 million to 231 groups and activities inside the San Francisco city limits. Cultural institutions as august as the San Francisco Opera, as festive and fun as the St. Patrick's Day and Carnaval parades and as grassroots-minded as neighborhood arts centers have found good things to do with the money.
Why shouldn't visitors help to keep those ventures alive? Local residents need and want them, and a good many travelers flock to San Francisco for its high culture and edgy arts scene, cultural diversity and offbeat energy. Travel-related taxes in turn help nourish the attractions that draw those visitors, joining travel and taxation in a feedback loop.
Look, no one deeply loves paying taxes, and opposition to taxes of any kind is a quasi-religious tenet in the United States, I realize. But if Americans want the cultural depth and richness of Europe and the 21st century infrastructure of Japan and parts of fast-developing China and the Middle East, the money has to come from somewhere.
Travel can and should pay its fair share.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Push for Passengers' Rights Is Building
It's too soon to know for sure - re: my post early this week - whether an air passengers' bill of rights in the United States is is an idea whose time has come. However, developments over the past two days suggest that support for basic reform in air travel is gaining traction inside the American business community, the U.S. Congress and beyond.
This build in momentum has has been given a big push by the recent hold overnight of an ExpressJet regional service operated for Continental Airlines at an airport in Rochester, Minn. Dozens of passengers sat for some six hours without adequate water, food or restrooms, the latest of a string of such highly publicized incidents.
On Thursday, Aug. 13, the National Business Travel Association endorsed a three-hour time limit on the length of time airlines can hold passengers on an airplane while it's away from an airport terminal and stranded on the tarmac. This is a key provision of a U.S. Senate bill called the Federal Aviation Administration Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act (S1451), introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine).
The NBTA additionally backs provisions of the bill that would require airlines to provide passengers with food, potable water, comfortable cabin temperatures and ventilization and working restrooms while a plane is on the ground. Airports and Airlines would be required to draw up contingency plans, reviewed by the U.S. Department of Transportation, and be subject to fines if they didn't write those plans. The bill would also create a consumer hotline.
NBTA President and CEO Keven Maquire said in a statement "For years, the business travel industry believed the airlines and the federal government would work together to fix the problems that led to excessive tarmac delays, but enough is enough. When we've got travelers stuck on planes sitting on the tarmac overnight, it's clear the problem has spun out of control, and legislation is the best solution.''
Airlines believe legislation restricts their ability to operate flexibly. They push back hard against such proposals. But the European Union has already instituted its own version of an air passengers' bill of rights, and now, support is building in the United States.
Also on Thursday, Aug. 13, flyersrights.org (formerly the Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights) and the Business Travel Coalition, a national association of corporate travel planners, joined forces to start a new group designed to serve as a global advocate of passengers' rights. The group is called airpassengeradvocacy.travel. It will soon hold what organizers term a "stakeholder hearing'' of industry leaders to air their ideas for reforming air travel; that meeting is planned for Sept. 22, in Washington, D.C., with former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall - credited as the inventor of frequent flyer miles, BTW - as keynote speaker.
"I think there is a need to put together a group that can work across borders on these issues and help one another, particularly because in recent years, these issues have really become global in nature,'' said Kevin Mitchell, who heads the BTC, in Aviation Daily. Mitchell divides his time between Philadelphia and the EU capital, Brussels.
It's good to see reformers are thinking globally, as aviation is a quintessentially global business. Whether new laws will be enacted - and whether they'll be tough, fair and consistently enforced - will go a long way toward deciding if this is travel change we can believe in.
This build in momentum has has been given a big push by the recent hold overnight of an ExpressJet regional service operated for Continental Airlines at an airport in Rochester, Minn. Dozens of passengers sat for some six hours without adequate water, food or restrooms, the latest of a string of such highly publicized incidents.
On Thursday, Aug. 13, the National Business Travel Association endorsed a three-hour time limit on the length of time airlines can hold passengers on an airplane while it's away from an airport terminal and stranded on the tarmac. This is a key provision of a U.S. Senate bill called the Federal Aviation Administration Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act (S1451), introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine).
The NBTA additionally backs provisions of the bill that would require airlines to provide passengers with food, potable water, comfortable cabin temperatures and ventilization and working restrooms while a plane is on the ground. Airports and Airlines would be required to draw up contingency plans, reviewed by the U.S. Department of Transportation, and be subject to fines if they didn't write those plans. The bill would also create a consumer hotline.
NBTA President and CEO Keven Maquire said in a statement "For years, the business travel industry believed the airlines and the federal government would work together to fix the problems that led to excessive tarmac delays, but enough is enough. When we've got travelers stuck on planes sitting on the tarmac overnight, it's clear the problem has spun out of control, and legislation is the best solution.''
Airlines believe legislation restricts their ability to operate flexibly. They push back hard against such proposals. But the European Union has already instituted its own version of an air passengers' bill of rights, and now, support is building in the United States.
Also on Thursday, Aug. 13, flyersrights.org (formerly the Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights) and the Business Travel Coalition, a national association of corporate travel planners, joined forces to start a new group designed to serve as a global advocate of passengers' rights. The group is called airpassengeradvocacy.travel. It will soon hold what organizers term a "stakeholder hearing'' of industry leaders to air their ideas for reforming air travel; that meeting is planned for Sept. 22, in Washington, D.C., with former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall - credited as the inventor of frequent flyer miles, BTW - as keynote speaker.
"I think there is a need to put together a group that can work across borders on these issues and help one another, particularly because in recent years, these issues have really become global in nature,'' said Kevin Mitchell, who heads the BTC, in Aviation Daily. Mitchell divides his time between Philadelphia and the EU capital, Brussels.
It's good to see reformers are thinking globally, as aviation is a quintessentially global business. Whether new laws will be enacted - and whether they'll be tough, fair and consistently enforced - will go a long way toward deciding if this is travel change we can believe in.
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