Do you turn up at Heathrow knowing which seat you want, or not even knowing which airline you're on? Having done the latter - which makes life tricky when you're picking the tickets up at the airport - I'm trying to get better organised. And the internet is obviously the way to do it.
Everyone knows you can book plane tickets online - a feature introduced by TravelWeb way back in 1995. Some people know you can find seating plans and seat numbers for different airlines. You can also find out how to get to the airport and back, what the weather is like at your destination, the exchange rate, visa requirements and many other useful things. And instead of sticking with the comfort factors of chains such as Sheraton and Holiday Inn, you can even book a local hotel.
While booking plane tickets is one of the web's most heavily-touted features, I've never done it. The software on most sites I've tried has been so appalling it's hard to believe the programmers have ever booked a seat in their lives, and only a few sites such as Dial-a-Flight seem to search from all London airports at once. But even if these sites worked properly, you couldn't rely on them: running the same search on different sites often produces completely different flights.
That doesn't mean I never search for business flights on Expedia, Travelocity and other brain-damaged dog-slow websites, particularly for long-haul trips. It just means I search to get an idea of what options might be available before phoning a travel agent or budget airline.
Once the flight is booked, it can be useful to check seating arrangements and airport details. For seating plans, I usually follow the links from About's business travel site. For airport details, I go to Airwise, which has its own descriptions of how to get to and from some of the world's larger airports. .
When it comes to booking hotels, renting cars and other arrangements, companies and individuals have their own preferences. Even though it ignores my favourite, the Radisson chain, the best starting point for British travellers is the Financial Times's FT.com travel page at www.ft.com/travel/. This has links to hotel chains, airlines, travel companies and so on. Of course, it would be even better if it looked like Hotsheet instead of using drop-down lists, but while the programmers have made the page less accessible, they haven't rendered it useless. The Trip is also good, but it's American.
When booking in foreign currencies, it's handy to have a quick converter open in another browser window. I tend to use Oanda's Classic 164 Currency Converter ) or the Universal Currency Converter or www.cali.co.uk/NB/cc/.
Travellers with time to spare can also research their destination. The US government provides the quickest hit for a background briefing, though the British government has something similar. WorldSkip provides wonderful collections of links. There's also a quick way to check for national holidays overseas: the Easy Does IT (Internet & Translation) site, www.national-holidays.com
Today's business traveller will almost certainly need some form of internet or email access, and for the past five years, I've used America Online. AOL's Globalnet gets you online from almost anywhere faster than you can figure out how the shower works - if you've remembered to look up the local phone number in advance http://intlaccess.web.aol.com.
However, "global roaming" is now feasible with a stan dard internet account, thanks to the GRIC Alliance Network and iPass, which boasts "5,000 POPs in 150 countries".
It may be useful to know the whereabouts of the nearest cybercafe, too. You can look that up in Cybercafes.com or the Cybercafe Search Engine.
With millions of "road warriors" traversing the globe - travel is a $500bn business in the US alone - it's no surprise that there are hundreds of websites catering to our needs. Most are awful, and/or have a strong American bias. But the About network's business travel centre, run by Bruce Goldberg and Sarah Cusick, is worth the trip to http://businesstravel.about.com, while Roadnews http://roadnews.com can be handy for those travelling with notebook PCs.
Finally, it's well worth preparing for problems with notebook PCs and handheld computers that can break or be lost or stolen. I email all my travel plans to a web-based email service at Yahoo ( mail.yahoo.com ) so that I'll still be able to get at them. You can also put your contacts book and schedule online at Yahoo or another site such as Anyday.com.
Indeed, thanks to XDrive and similar services, you can also upload copies of any special software you might need, plus a back-up of your handheld computer.
Five years ago, many business travellers believed they would be OK as long as they didn't lose their American Express or Visa card and their FiloFax. Today they only have to hang on to their plastic and a couple of website addresses.
