Surprise tech innovations discovered at NBTA

You may have never heard of the National Business Travel Association, but the agent who booked your last business trip almost certainly has. The industry organization represents more than 2,000 corporate travel managers and suppliers – the people behind the scenes who make your trip happen.

I only mention NBTA because I happened to spend the last three days at its annual convention in Atlanta. (As a matter of disclosure, I had been hired as a consultant for one of its in-house publications.) In most years, the trade floor is dominated by obscure business-to-business companies that offer products the average traveler would find about as interesting as a lecture on airline yield-management systems.

Not this time.

As I patrolled the trade show floor, I discovered several products that road warriors might find useful. Here are a few:

AirportParkingLots.com

The idea behind this Web site is simple, and you don’t have to wait for your company’s travel manager to act before taking advantage of it. (One more point of disclosure – I like most travel managers. Really.) Just click on the site, enter your departure and return dates, and the site returns a price quote for the entire parking stay and then sends a confirmed reservation via e-mail. The company negotiates volume discounts with airport parking lots that are dramatically lower than published rates. For example, the price quote at Baltimore-Washington was $4 a day, which is one-third off the regular rate. At Denver, they’ve managed to negotiate an unbelievable 50 percent off. My only concern is that some airport parking lots are cheaper because they’re so remote. I had to wonder if the Denver lot was closer to the old Stapleton than DIA.

Net-roamer

This is the product that I swore didn’t exist, until some guy at the trade show floor pulled me aside and told me otherwise. Turns out I had corresponded with one of Net-roamer’s executives a few weeks earlier and had told them unequivocally that a product like theirs wasn’t available. (Shoulda known it was a trick question.) Net-roamer essentially offers worldwide dial-up access to the Internet, regardless of your Internet service provider (ISP). It allows you to access any of 12,000 other ISPs in 150 countries for a reasonable rate. I’m hesitant to quote Net-roamer’s prices in this column because they’re a little confusing – minutes are billed on a sliding scale and a deposit is required to open an account. But the beauty of this service is how simple it is once you get past that – truly easy-to-use and intuitive. Until I began testing Windows XP (that’s another story) configuring e-mail on my laptop was a chore. Net-roamer is the best solution I’ve seen.

WeEmail4u.com

Here’s an interesting twist on remote computing: forget the computer. WeEmail4u.com is an Internet-based transcription service that lets you send voice-to-text e-mail messages from any phone, anytime. How does it work? Call the company’s toll-free number and dictate your e-mail message. WeEmail4u.com guarantees that it’ll send your message within four hours and it also assures you that your e-mail address will be in the sender line (that way the response will go to you and not back to the company). The prices are a little prohibitive – 99 cents for the first 100 words and one cent per word after that – but if you’re in a pinch and the laptop doesn’t work, it could be a useful solution. WeEmail4u.com still hasn’t figured out how to reverse the process, as far as I can tell, although some of the unified messaging services offer voice-activated services that come close. I’d be remiss if I also didn’t mention the company’s incentive to sign up for its service. If you log on now and become a customer, you’ll get $5 worth of free messages. Just don’t go dictating the next chapter of your novel as a test message.

iJet Travel Intelligence

The final company that I wanted to mention is iJet, but before I do, let me issue yet another (and I promise my final) disclosure – I know iJet’s founder and am an advisor to the company. However, I have not benefited materially from my relationship with iJet and am not being compensated in any way for writing about it now. iJet had a low-profile presence at the NBTA show, and although its “travel intelligence” reports are only available to corporate customers, I think it may not be long before you’ll be able to sign up for iJet as an individual. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner the better. The sample reports I’ve seen are like nothing else available. Think of iJet as a service that tracks your trip, alerting you to any security problems, inclement weather or health risks while you’re on the road. iJet uses intelligence-gathering techniques developed by the military as opposed to competitors who hire washed-up travel writers like me to compile their destination reports.

These sites – with the exception of iJet – are resources you can consider using right now. Let me know how you like them.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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