Save time, money and your sanity (not necessarily in that order) with these business travel tips!

1. If you like the window seat and the pilot’s tour leaves you wanting more, America from the Air, by Daniel Matthews and James Jackson (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), uses aerial photography of the most common flight paths to explain the geology, natural history and human history below. Don’t want one more thing to lug around? Pop the accompanying CD-ROM into your laptop to learn a little something at 30,000 feet.

2. When you travel for business, you’re the thriftiest packer ever—but leisure trips are another story. (Blame it on the family.) With weight overage charges sky-high, make it a priority to know you haven’t gone over the 50-pound limit for most airlines before you leave the house. Don’t trust your bathroom scale? Hand-held scales are available just for this purpose (travelonbags.com, magellans.com).

3. It’s a rainy day, and you’re sitting in your cozy window seat, watching bags get soaked as handlers load them into the plane. You may be dry, but your bag isn’t. Janet Attard, of businessknowhow.com, suggests preventing soft-side luggage from getting soaked by lining the bottom of the bag with a plastic drycleaner’s bag. Place another bag over the top. Voilà: No more damp, wrinkled clothes when you get to the hotel.

4. TSA liquid restrictions are annoying, but you’ve dealt with them. The only problem is that you no longer get to carry the toiletry brands you love, because you can’t find them in three-ounce sizes. A trip to minimus.biz will take care of that: The site carries all things, well, minimal. From Tom’s of Maine toothpaste to Obsession for Men aftershave balm, they’ve got it all. Put everything in a handy Minimus carry-on caddy, which holds your plastic quart bag discreetly with a clip outside your carry-on—meaning no more fumbling.

5. When printing or receiving travel documents —itineraries, confirmation emails, maps—move them immediately into a colored, transparent envelope. It’s easy to grab on your way out the door to the airport, and easy to find in your bag. The envelope also becomes a handy place to store receipts.

6. For some crucial trips, you can’t afford to have a flight cancelled or delayed, because you’ll miss a meeting. On those occasions, double-book airline tickets. In addition to the flight that’s your number one choice, purchase a fully refundable ticket for the same schedule, but on another airline or from another local airport.

7. Layovers and delayed flights can become great work times, but not if you’re distracted. Find quiet airport getaways at airporthavens.com. Whether it’s the cell-phone parking lot at SeaTac (on a clear day) or outside the smoking “cage” at Tampa International, you’ll find a secret hiding spot.

8. You’re delayed, and the lack of information is frustrating. Is it really the weather? Check the United or American cargo web sites, click on Flight Status and enter your flight number. Cargo customers tend to get more detailed information than people customers.

9. What you can’t see can hurt you. New U.S. passports and some credit cards use RFID (radio frequency identification) chips. Because they transmit radio waves, they are also continuously transmitting your personal information. RFID-blocking passport cases, billfolds or wallets will prevent interception and keep your identity safe.

10. So your company no longer allows you to expense airline club rooms. Not to worry: Some airlines offer day rates, like Alaska’s Board Rooms or Delta’s Crown
Rooms, for $25–30. The peace and quiet are priceless.

11. It’s something we all know we should do, but have you ever made copies of your important documents—scans of your passport, birth certificate, credit-card numbers, driver’s license and medical information—to store on-line where you can access them anytime, anywhere? KeepYouSafe.com provides an online safe deposit box that’s encrypted, so it’s safe and secure.

12. Some countries will not allow visitors to enter if their passports show they have been to certain countries (not uncommon in Africa, for instance). The solution is to apply for a “restricted” passport, in addition to your regular passport, for use only when entering these countries. These special passports are issued by the State Department, but may require proof of need, such as a confirmed itinerary.

13. Your company is too small for a corporate travel department, but too big to keep things straight when several of you travel together. Group travel sites to the rescue! Groopvine, a service from Groople.com (groopvine.groople.com/pages), and Triphub.com help everyone in your party coordinate, without one person having to play the role of organizer.

14. There are all sorts of ways to get real-time flight and airport status. From a mobile phone or PDA with Internet access, Yahoo! and Google can update you. For Yahoo!, visit m.yahoo.com and type in your airline and flight number, or send a text message to 92466 (which spells YAHOO) with your airline and flight number. You’ll receive a text message back with the flight status. For Google, send a text message to 466453 (which spells GOOGLE) to receive a status message back. If you’re at a computer, Flightstats.com is considered highly reliable; and many airports now have complete status boards on their home pages, just like those boards at the airport, which include baggage claim numbers. Check out Los Angeles (laairports.com), Kansas City (flykci.com) and New Orleans (flymsy.com).

15. If you serve as your own travel agent and personal assistant, use Tripit.com to organize your next journey. Email confirmation messages about your air travel, hotel, car, rail, restaurant reservations and activities, and the site will compile them into a single itinerary that includes confirmation numbers, locations, weather maps, city guides, OpenTable restaurant reservations and more. Now you can get back to your real job.

16. Full-fare coach seats-—Y-Up fares-—often come with an automatic upgrade. They’re slightly more expensive than last-minute low-fare coach seats, but they can be handy if your company has restrictions on flying first class.

17. When planning a business flight, you need information to cover the “what-if”s. ExpertFlyer.com provides all fares for a single round-trip ticket, outlining the corresponding restrictions on each fare. It will also show all possible upgrades and award tickets on flights, in real-time. If upgrades or award tickets are not available for the flight you want, set up an alert to let you know when that status changes. The only downside: a monthly fee of $4.99 or $9.99, depending on service level.

18. If you visit a city frequently (perhaps for a long-term project or consulting gig), look into longer-term hotel rates. Many hotels give a discount after one month, which makes it more economical not to check out when going home for the weekend. Why re-pack for every trip, when you don’t have to?

19. Avoid the itch— visit bedbugregistry.com, which lists U.S. hotels with bedbug reports. The brands on the list will surprise you. Need we say more?

20. Plan ahead for a better arrival. Request items in advance that will smooth your stay: a bottle of wine, a six-pack of your favorite soda or a particular newspaper. And don’t forget to request a room with a view or other preference.

21. When you need to impress a client (or just want to add some fun to a trip), rent a luxury car. It may be a little splurge, but it won’t break the bank. Rental directories like exoticcarrental.com will point you to luxury car-rental companies across the U.S. Many will even deliver to the airport or your hotel.

22. Your hotel may be able to lighten your carry-on load. Kimpton InTouch members can log on to a website and adjust their travel preferences, so rooms are stocked in advance with amenities that can be left at the hotel after a guest’s stay. Even if you’re not an InTouch member, you can leave a bag of personal products at the hotel that will be kept for future stays.

23. Get equipped for Wi-Fi before you leave the airport. The Avis Connect device (avis.com) offers portable Wi-Fi service that can be easily unplugged from your rental car’s cigarette lighter and brought into a hotel room to plug into the wall. The cost is $10.95 per day, which beats what many hotels charge for Internet access.

24. Road-weary and almost home, but can’t remember where you parked? Next time, use your phone to snap a photo of the area marker in the lot when you arrive
—because you have more important things to file away in your brain.

25. Set up your booking preferences to employ your rarely used airline frequent-flier program numbers when renting cars. You wouldn’t have accumulated that many miles from the car rental, anyway, but the small deposit will keep all your airline miles active.

26. Left something behind in a taxi? Don’t give up on getting it back. GPS systems in many taxis can track your item down within hours. When Nik Munson, a professional musician, left his acoustic bass guitar in the trunk of a New York cab using the VeriFone GPS system, he reported it lost to the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC). Authorities at the TLC were able to locate the cab using GPS technology and return the guitar to Munson that same day.

27. Take the guesswork out of finding your limo at the arrivals area. Some limousine services will email your mobile device 15 minutes prior to pickup to notify you where the vehicle is waiting, as well as give you the chauffeur’s name and cell-phone number.

28. Listening to long-winded voicemail can be a real time-drain, especially when traveling. SimulScribe (simulscribe.com) converts voicemail messages to text and delivers them to your mobile phone, PDA or email account. Select any message (instead of having to work top-down through an audio queue) and reply via email. A similar service, SpinVox, recently announced its blogging service, Spin My Blog, which lets users blog from their phones to their social networking pages. Travelers can talk into their phones about their travels, and the updates will automatically post to their Facebook, Twitter or Jaiku pages.

29. Lighten your load by carrying your PowerPoint or Keynote presentation on your iPod. Plug the iPod into a TV or projector, and you’re ready to go. You set it up manually (search engadget.com for instructions), or use a product like ThinkFree Office iPod Edition. You can also keep it even lighter by leaving the projector at home: Projector123.com rents LCD projectors online and will deliver them by FedEx on the next business day to any location in the United States.

30. An Ipsos-Reid study shows that most BlackBerry users can turn 53 minutes of downtime (sitting in an airport, for example) into productive work time each day.
CyberShift’s Necho Expense application (cybershift.com) for BlackBerry enables business travelers to submit expense reports directly from their PDAs.

31. SOCK IT TO ME Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) is a blood clot that forms in the deep vein system of the lower leg, often from sitting for extended periods of time. Keep a pair of support travel socks like Microfiber Firm Support Travel Socks (ameswalker.com) to throw into your carry-on for long-haul flights.

32. Leave your cards at home. Elite Priority Club members can consolidate all their frequent-flier numbers onto the back of a single Priority Club card. Members log on to a Priority Club Rewards account, select the Customize Member Card option and enter up to 10 member IDs into an online form. Cards arrive within two to four weeks by first-class mail. For security purposes, Priority Club Rewards will not store or save other membership numbers.

33. Use downtime at the airport to catch up on banking. Some companies, such as Yodlee (yodlee.com), offer secure access to your account via your mobile phone. Check balances, transfer funds and monitor expenses. New technology also allows remote deposits and bill payment (miteksystems.com)—download the software, snap photos of the check to deposit or bill to pay, receive a confirmation email and you’re done.

34. After a long business trip, nothing is more frustrating than gathering up travel and expense receipts and painstakingly inputting them into an expense report. Time to automate. An expense application like Concur Travel & Expense (concur.com) eliminates the need for traditional expense reports and reduces the number of steps, clicks and pieces of paper involved with booking travel and creating expense reports.

35. Studies show that one in five people catches a cold within a week of flying, so you wouldn’t think of getting onboard without a tube of hand sanitizer. Take it to the next level with the Pure-Go wrist band (purgocreations.com), which dispenses sanitizer from your wrist with the push of a button. Or be more discreet and duck into the lav to swab your nostrils with Nozin nasal sanitizer (nozin.com), which claims to be the first sanitizer for the nose and fights germs for up to eight hours.

36. A recent study conducted by Georg Eifert, a professor of clinical psychology at West Virginia University, shows that outdoor exercise reduces the level of stress hormones. Avoid the hotel fitness room and hit the pavement. The RunWestin program, available at many of the brand’s properties, provides runs guided by “running concierges” who also serve as cultural guides. The James Hotel in Chicago offers a package that includes two rental bikes loaded with GPS systems and a messenger bag stocked with bottled water, energy bars and a city map. City Running Tours (cityrunningtours.com) offers guided running tours of New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Diego and Charleston.

37. HOLD THE DOOR If you’re in a rush to make your meeting, turn your elevator into an express shuttle. Roadwarriortips.com suggests holding the “close door” button while pressing your destination floor, and you can sometimes make it a straight shot. OK, it’s not the most considerate approach—but sometimes you just need to pull out all the stops.

38. Traveling on a day with no meetings? Wear running shoes to the airport, and you can spend your layover walking around, instead of sitting in the food court. You may even be able to fit in a gym workout—a handful of major airports now have health clubs in the terminal or an attached hotel. Research your options before you go at airportgyms.com, which lists more than 100 facilities in the U.S. and Canada, along with their rates.

39. Keep your energy up by packing your briefcase with healthy snacks, such as instant oatmeal or soup. If you’ll be in meetings all day, bring snacks—granola and an apple, for example—to fend off catered afternoon cookie breaks.

40. If you didn’t bring food on the trip, ask the hotel concierge to direct you to a nearby store to stock up. Eating out night after night can cloud your food decisions. Weight Watchers Online recommends looking at a menu and pretending you’re in your own kitchen to make healthier choices. Would you make potato skins with cheese and sour cream at home? Choose an entrée you’d be more likely to cook for yourself, such as pasta, a chicken breast with vegetables or a fajita.

41. You finished that gripping novel on the plane, and you hate to throw it away—so send the book on a journey of its own. Leave it in a public space, with a note that encourages the finder to read it, make a journal entry about it, then leave it in another public space. Visit bookcrossing.com for details, journal entries and other items to help push your books off into the world.

42. DANIELLE STEAL Need more reading material for your night in the hotel room? Check the seat pockets at the front of the plane as you exit to grab magazines left behind by fellow passengers.