The UK incident and subsequent tightened security is going to have significant impact on business travel (which subsidises the rest of the punters).
Assuming that the current restrictions stay in place and are adopted more widely (which I fully expect, albeit in a minimally less stringent form), business travel will drop off for a number of reasons
- lack of time effectiveness on there-and-back-in-a-day European trips (time needed to check-in and retrieve your luggage, total loss of in-flight working time, significant increase in security procedures)
- reluctance to risk the loss of your notebook/Filofax/PDA/mobile/business documents,
- general re-thinking of the necessity, cost-effectiveness and risk-management aspects of travel
- the general pain in the butt of the whole thing
Airlines and airports will be forced to re-address the security and liability issues relating to checked luggage. Anyone who's halfway observant has seen the way that luggage is handled and I've had my share of suitcases-dropped-from-a-great-height.
If you restrict a customer's carry-ons to passport and ticket, you automatically assume liability for the contents of his checked-luggage. Exclusion clauses for electronic equipment etc will disappear. The courts will see to that.
Costs will increase, with RFID becoming the standard platform for providing an audit trail of luggage from check-in to retrieval, airports being forced to restructure their airside facilities to provide arrival duty-free sales to replace departure shopping and access to travel necessities in a sterile environment, major accounts (or the market) will force airlines to provide business travellers with secure and preferential transportation for checked-in hand luggage.
Multi-layered and more stringent security procedures for airport/airline employees will become standard.
The list goes on forever.
Just watch all this unfold before our very eyes....
Last edited by RevMan2; 11th August 2006 at 19:22.
Reason: Edited for improved clarity