What the professionals tell us

By A.B.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL'S Middle Seat column recently looked at travel tips from the pros. The journalist, Scott McCartney, spoke to a group of corporate travel managers to find out what they had learned that could help ordinary travellers travel better. These are people, remember, whose working lives revolve around juggling itineraries, making deals with airlines, calming stressed, delayed executives and generally ensuring that their companies' workers arrive in the best possible shape at the best possible time without going over budget.

The reassuring thing about these tips was their ordinariness. The professionals do not, it seems, have a set of insights that enable them to get deals that the rest of us can only dream of when booking for ourselves. The best tip was to join every hotel loyalty programme going, as even the most basic membership might be enough to earn "room upgrades, late checkout times, access to lounges with snacks and drinks, free Wi-Fi, free breakfast and even complimentary laundry service". Most of the other suggestions were common sense: be nice, use apps, do some preparation, etc. The chances are that when you book your summer holidays, you're not doing it any differently from someone who books travel for a living—an encouraging thought.