Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) has published its EMEA Traveller Security White Paper, exposing the flaws behind stringent security measures.
Although last week”s session at ACTE”s Global Education Conference in Barcelona determined that security measures are necessary to have in place”they have to be successful in order to be respected.
Post 9/11 the US has been intent on gathering advanced passenger information for all passengers entering the US. But the question has been raised: what is being done with the data?
US travel policy is deemed far too heavy handed, whereas European security procedures were at least praised for embarking on measures quietly (and this was even after the liquids ban).
Session presenter and London School of Economics visiting fellow Gus Hosein said: ”Because of the volume of passengers and the volume of information passing through, tens of thousands of people are wrongfully on the no-fly list. The systems are not in place to deal with such high volumes.”
The majority of information needed for security purposes, such as where passengers are staying on their first night in the US, was deemed unnecessary by most of the room. Insight was offered into travel management practice, with many of those filling in the forms not putting the correct information in order to get through the form quicker. This is because about 35 information fields need to be filled in per passenger with airlines forced to send this information.
The information also has to be sent”and somehow checked”24 hours before the flight. Some have decided that civil liberties are being infringed as a result, with the situation only likely to get worse as time goes on. But the real problem travel managers have is that it creates a lot of extra work with information needed for each of their corporate travellers.
Legal firm Arent Fox attorney Anthony Lupo debated: ”We”ve got to start somewhere,” prompting delegates to ask whether, in terms of security measures, ”something is better than nothing?”