Joe Brancatelli has written an interesting piece in The Washington Post about issues that will affect business travellers this year.

Happily, he also slates the new rules the U.S. Department of Transportation has imposed for traveling with batteries (travellers in the US must now know how many grammes of lithium their batteries contain before taking them on-board or checking them into luggage).

Batteries aside, here's what we should look out for in 2008:

Open Skies: this agreement kicks off on March 2008 and "will liberalize many of the aviation treaties that limit which airlines can fly to which international destinations, and when they can."

The Urge to Merge: Happy days of being in the black for the US' "legacy carriers" was shortlived, and airlines' stocks are already free-falling. So, "watch for an endless series of "discussions" about combinations and even a merger announcement or two."

Nets on Jets: "American, Alaska Airlines, and Lufthansa...will launch new initiatives, while in recent months, JetBlue, Air France, and several Arab carriers put a few internet-enabled aircraft in the skies on a trial basis." And Joe notes the sentiments that have been ricocheting across the media: what are the social downfalls of this initiative? "What happens when your chatty seatmate on the aisle plug into Skype and talk nonstop coast-to-coast. Or when some jerk logs into YouPorn.com? And who wins the space race when someone reclines their seat right into the lap of the business traveler who needs to set up a laptop, log on, and finish a report?"

Lodging, Both Class and Mass: In the US, "so many new hotel rooms are coming online that we may actually have more beds than heads. That'll mean a long-overdue moderation of nightly room rates." And overseas, "the big hotel chains see a market ripe for the plucking... there seems to be no end to the number of luxury hotel brands being created to cater to the super-deluxe market."

The Fine Print: "What else should you watch for this year on the road? The disappearance, sale, or collapse of state-owned carriers such as Olympic of Greece and Alitalia, the perennial sick men of the European skies ... Another major new aircraft, the so-called Boeing Dreamliner, is set to debut in the fall ... A new terminal for Heathrow Airport, prosaically called T5, opens in London in the spring ... And barring a major financial correction that depresses passenger traffic, lots more delays and discomfort when you fly. But you'd already guessed that one, right?"

Read more here