Missed Business Travel News

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Financial whiz Felix Salmon and media maven Jeff Bercovici post 24/7, but I am ushered up the aisle and into Seat 2B just once a week. That means there are dozens of topics I should have covered and lots of business-travel news that didn’t quite make the cut.

I hate to end the year leaving anything out, so here are some quick bites of the business-travel apple that we easily could have talked about in more detail. Don’t assume the relative brevity of the coverage means these topics are any less important.

Registered Traveler’s Unclear Future

The same post-9/11 legislation that federalized airport security and created the Transportation Security Administration empowered the T.S.A. to permit privately run programs for "trusted travelers." Congress knew federalized procedures would be burdensome, invasive, and time-consuming, so it wanted private enterprise to create security-bypass plans for high-frequency, low-risk business travelers.

Unfortunately, the T.S.A. didn't. It has spent seven years making it virtually impossible for outsiders to profitably create and manage what has become known as Registered Traveler. The T.S.A.'s "not invented here" mindset has crushed third-party innovations like scanners that would allow travelers to keep their shoes on during security screenings. The agency permits no form of security bypass for any flier. It has even created a kooky kabuki at the checkpoints: Registered travelers, whose membership cards are embedded with biometric data, may still be required to show photo ID.

That has decimated the market for programs like Clear, the private plan created by journalist and entrepreneur Steve Brill. Hobbled by T.S.A. intransigence and their own hubris, Brill and his competitors now can't offer much besides "line cut" privileges at security checkpoints. Fewer than two dozen U.S. airports have signed up—important travel hubs such as Dallas/Fort Worth, Chicago, Houston, Minneapolis, and Detroit haven't bothered—and only about 250,000 frequent fliers have joined.

Things aren't likely to get better in 2009. New T.S.A. bosses under President Obama might look more kindly on registered traveler programs, but the drastic drop in travel since Labor Day means frequent fliers probably won't need to shell out $200 or more to bypass lines that have largely disappeared.

Lufthansa's Wholly German Empire

As airlines around the world have coalesced into loose "alliances" with grandiose names like Oneworld and SkyTeam to help them compete on a global scale, the German carrier Lufthansa has gone much further. Buttressed by a pair of mighty hubs in Frankfurt and Munich and buoyed by its grip on the homegrown German market, Lufthansa has chosen to gobble up as many competitors as logic and finances allow.

It started with the 2005 purchase of Swiss International, the successor to Swissair, which came with a compact, efficient hub in Zurich. This year, Lufthansa added three more useful carriers: Brussels Airlines, Bmi of Britain, and Austrian Airlines. Brussels has a good network of intra-Europe flights and an admirable web of connections to Africa. Austrian Airlines has a hub in Vienna that offers excellent service throughout Eastern Europe. And Bmi (formerly British Midland) has more takeoff and landing slots at London's Heathrow Airport than any carrier except British Airways.

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