What Electronics Ban?
Emirates is well known for providing outstanding customer service. Now they are showing the lengths they are willing to go to mitigate the negative effects of the TSA’s electronics ban.
Starting today, travelers in First and Business class can utilize a carrier-provided tablet during their flight. Passengers can download documents onto a memory stick to work on during the flight and then transfer the data to their own devices after the flight has arrived.
This service augments the previously announced device handling service for all US-bound passengers. With this complimentary service, customers are able to use their own devices until the last moment before they board the flight. Emirates employees will then take the devices, tag them, and then stow them in the cargo hold. Upon arrival, passengers can then retrieve those devices.
The Emirates tablets are Microsoft Surface tablets with Microsoft Office 2016 already installed.
How we’ll use this
The electronics ban continues to present challenges to business travelers. Many have company data policies prohibiting physical separation from firm devices (Jennifer’s firm, for example). We had tentatively planned a trip to Dubai on Emirates next weekend. Now we have postponed any travel on affected carriers until the restrictions are lifted. Or until we can travel without our usual stash of electronics, although the disconnection anxiety may be overwhelming.
The tablet loan, however, would allow us to work on non-sensitive documents during flight. At minimum, we could stay up to date on blog articles and non-confidential work. We like the idea of maintaining connectivity and working around the pointless electronics ban.
Both for policy reasons and for good practice, there’s no way I’m plugging a memory stick back into my computer after it’s been in a public unsecured tablet, regardless of whether the transferred documents are sensitive or not.