Are the hassles too much? That's the question Jeff Parker, manager of recognition and reward programs for RBC Centura, a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada based in Raleigh, N.C., keeps asking himself regarding the incentive trip he's planning to Jamaica. Parker estimates that as many as half of his attendees don't have passports. And they won't learn if they have won the trip until November 9, two months before it takes place.

In the past, that might have been tight, but do-able. But with today's passport delays, he's in an awful jam.

“I've decided that if someone learns in November that they need a passport by January, I'll pay to expedite the process,” Parker says. “During a conversation with the State Department, they tried to assure me that the normal passport turnaround time will be back to six to eight weeks.”

But he's worried. “I don't think I'm going to sleep much until the day the trip starts.”

He's Not Alone

Although international destinations continue to be highly desirable, in the past couple of years, they have become a harder sell. The passage of the Western Hemisphere Initiative — which requires all travelers, including U.S. citizens, to and from the Americas, the Caribbean, and Bermuda to have a passport or other accepted document that establishes identity and citizenship to enter or re-enter the United States — has created a run to passport offices by millions of Americans and processing delays at the U.S. State Department. The State Department will process more than 17 million passports in 2007 — a 40 percent increase over 2006 — but it failed to add enough staff to handle the increased load. Consequently, standard wait times for new passports, which used to be six to eight weeks, started running up to 12 weeks earlier this year, and the State Department was bombarded with calls and complaints from frantic would-be international travelers who had trips coming up and had not received their passports.

Cindy Olson, CMP, a senior account manager, travel operations, for Minneapolis-based MotivAction, sent a group to Cancun in May. “We told them in January to get their passports quickly,” says Olson. “We kept reminding them and reminding them. And they sent their applications in.”

But it didn't matter. “We had maybe five or six people who sent in their applications, had waited 12 to 14 weeks, and still hadn't received a passport,” Olson says. “We had a lot of people worried that they couldn't go on their incentive trip.”

Calls to the National Passport Information Center got this unhappy half dozen nowhere. Olson finally recommended that they contact their congressmen. That did it. “They finally got their passports,” she says. “But the last person to get a passport didn't get it until two days before the trip.”

In fact, the State Department is claiming that passport wait times are back to normal. But looming around the corner is another WHTI deadline. In 2008, passengers crossing U.S. borders by land or sea will need passports, and travel experts are predicting that there will be another rush for the documents.

Security Woes

The trouble continues once passengers get to the airport and try to get to their planes. “Cancellations and delays, security hassles, a decline in customer service levels, meltdowns like what we saw with JetBlue last winter — it's all one big unhappy picture of an interconnected issue,” is how Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, Radnor, Pa., describes the situation.

The air travel system is overloaded, agrees Scott McCartney, travel editor for The Wall Street Journal and author of its “The Middle Seat” column. “It's like a freeway system,” he says. “The freeway may not be broken, but there aren't enough lanes to handle capacity at rush hour. We're back to full capacity and beyond with air travel, but the system has no apparent flexibility and no capacity for growth.”

If the sheer numbers of passengers boarding airplanes aren't enough, add in increasingly onerous security procedures and you've got a system that is seriously strssed.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta set a goal: to process passengers through screening lines in less than 10 minutes. That goal was never reached (and has since been abandoned), and, according to the Transportation Security Administration, wait times are increasing.

This past June, the national average peak waiting time to get through airport security lines was 13.77 minutes — an increase of 1 minute, 20 seconds over the 2006 average. At some airports, the wait times can be maddeningly long. According to TSA's figures, during 2006, it would have taken 35 to 50 minutes to get through the security lines at the main terminal in Atlanta.

Of course, security line delays and airport turmoil are a problem around the world. For example, London's Heathrow Airport has developed a reputation as one of the worst airports in the world, thanks to excruciatingly long security and passport lines, a terrible record with lost luggage, and crowded terminals. The problems have become so bad, in fact, that airport and government officials are worried that Heathrow will lose its position as Europe's premier gateway city. In an interview with the Financial Times, Treasury Secretary Kitty Ussher said she was afraid that multinational companies could start pulling away from London as a meeting destination. “I want multinational companies to feel really confident about housing their annual general meetings here,” she said. “I don't want their New York or Dubai executives saying ‘Oh God, I don't want to go through Heathrow.’”

For Parker's upcoming incentive trip to Jamaica, airport security hassles are yet another worry, as some of the 125 qualifiers, who range from bank executives to tellers, have never even flown before. “In our region [in North Carolina],” Parker explains, “many of our employees come from rural areas. They've rarely left the state, much less been on an airplane, never mind experiencing international travel.

“For someone like one of our commercial loan officers, getting on an airplane might not be much of an obstacle,” continues Parker. “But for a person not very travel-savvy, like many of our employees, it's going to be intimidating.”

Dollar Doldrums

Yet another concern is the falling dollar, especially when it comes to European travel. As late as May 2002, the dollar traded at 90 cents against the euro. This means that a trip to Europe today will cost about 60 percent more than the same trip would have cost just five years ago. In early 2002, the dollar traded as high as $1.41 against the British pound; by September of this year it had fallen to $2.02 against the pound — a decrease of more than 40 percent. And this does not take inflation into account.

“This is terrible for groups that are going outbound,” says Bill Boyd, CMP, CMM, CITE, president and CEO of Sunbelt Motivation & Travel Inc., Irving, Texas. “Planners with incentive programs tied into a fixed budget can no longer afford any currency associated with the euro. Anybody who could afford Europe two years ago is really going to have to take another look at it now.”

Of course, some companies have a compelling need to hold meetings there, despite the added expense. Judy Johnson, CMP, president and CEO of Rx Worldwide Meetings, Plano, Texas, focuses on clients in the pharmaceutical industry, all of whom have a huge presence in Europe. “London is over-the-top ridiculous now,” she says. “We just did two meetings there because the client requested it, but even he was shocked at how expensive it was. But the thing about London is that the demand [for the destination] is so high, it always seems to sell.”

Johnson says the rule of thumb for contracting for room rates in Europe used to be that a planner wouldn't go over $200 a night. “Those days are long gone,” she says.

Jennifer Lindsey, CMP, event operations and conference manager for PennWell Corp., a publishing company in Tulsa, Okla., plans the annual Deep Offshore Technology International Conference & Exhibition, which was held October 10-12 in Stavanger, Norway. “It's just killing me,” said Lindsey in the weeks preceding the conference. “The dollar is getting weaker every day. I just had to add $2,000 to my budget for hall rental.”

Lindsey says she took over responsibility for planning the event in May when everything seemed to be well under budget. At the time, the dollar traded at about $1.35 against the euro, meaning that by September it had depreciated about 5 percent in value. “And we don't allow for a lot of cushion in our budgets,” she says. “Maybe 2 [percent] or 3 percent. So now we're over budget, and it's hard to find savings two or three weeks out from the event.”

It could get worse. Some economists predict the dollar could fall to a record low of $1.45 against the euro — or perhaps even lower — by the end of the year. Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, believes that the dollar could fall “to half of its current value [in the next three years].”

“This will be a major, major decline, a much more significant decline than what we have seen over the last three years,” he warns.

Save Money in Europe

For those determined to go to Europe, planners offer a few tipsto squeeze the most out of your budget:

CONSIDER COUNTRIES with currencies that are not tied to the euro — particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. “Last year we booked a meeting in Prague,” says Judy Johnson, CMP, president and CEO of Rx Worldwide Meetings, Plano, Texas. “We ate at great restaurants, and I was really surprised because everything was so reasonable.” The Czech Republic plans to adopt the euro, but that probably won't happen until 2012.

CHOOSE A DESTINATION that will guarantee rates in dollars. Monaco is a prime example.

BE MORE FLEXIBLE when it comes to booking hotels. For Johnson, top-tier hotels used to be out of the question, but because everything is so expensive now, she has the go-ahead to look for deals at these properties. “If they have a hole, and we can fill it [at a reasonable] price, the client is more than willing to look at it because she doesn't want to have to spend $700 a night.”

CONSIDER A CRUISE. Faye Beauchine, executive vice president of Global Meetings, Incentives & Events for Carlson Marketing, Minneapolis, says that putting groups on cruises with multiple European stops is one way of keeping a trip affordable because these cruises can be paid for in dollars.

WORK WITH A DMC that will quote rates in dollars.

DUI? Don't Plan on Canada

One of the consequences of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative is that more Americans are carrying passports, which means that more Americans are having their passport information checked at border crossings.

At the U.S.-Canada border, this is a potential problem for U.S. citizens with drunken-driving convictions on their records. Travelers coming into Canada with a felony conviction — driving under the influence is a felony in Canada — can be prohibited from entering the country.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 1.4 million Americans were arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in 2005 — about 1 out of every 135 licensed drivers. Considering those numbers, it's highly likely a group going to Canada will have several attendees at risk of being turned away at the border.

A visit to www.cic.gc.ca/english/visit/conviction.asp outlines the steps individuals with a criminal record need to take for entry into Canada.

The 10 Best International Airports

1. HONG KONG INTERNATIONAL
   (Hong Kong was also voted best security processing.)

2. INCHEON INTERNATIONAL
   (Seoul, Korea)

3. CHANGI AIRPORT
   (Singapore)

4. MUNICH INTERNATIONAL
   (Munich, Germany)

5. KUALA LUMPUR INTERNATIONAL
   (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

6. ZURICH
   (Zurich also has the best immigration service.)

7. AMSTERDAM SCHIPHOL
   (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

8. VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL
   (Vancouver, British Columbia)

9. KANSAI INTERNATIONAL
   (Osaka, Japan)

10. MADRID BARAJAS INTERNATIONAL
    (Madrid, Spain)

SOURCE: Skytrax, an online forum of airline and airport passenger opinion

More On/Meetingsnet.com

We talked to well-known travel expert Peter Greenberg for his advice on reducing corporate travel hassles. Search our archives at MeetingsNet.com, keyword: Greenberg.