While business travel is rarely fun, it can at least be made as relaxing as possible by adopting a few simple tips. This page summarises the main things I've found make a difference to how hassle-free a trip is ...

First and most important, travel light. There's nothing more unpleasant than lugging heavy bags around, and if you have to put luggage in the hold then you add delays at both ends of the journey - at check-in, you can't use the faster check-in options (see below), and on arrival you have to wait around for your luggage to appear.

The biggest favour you can do yourself is to carry only a single item of luggage, small enough to be acceptable as hand-baggage. And unless you like carrying heavy bags down miles of airport corridors, the best solution is a roller-bag. If you only travel a few times a year, you can get a cheap-and-cheerful one from about £30, but if you travel regularly then a high-quality bag will pay dividends. Things to look for are:

• Lots of compartments
• A padded/suspended laptop compartment accessible from outside the case
• All compartments lockable (for leaving in hotel luggage stores after check-out)
• Good-quality wheel units for effortless wheeling

To fit everything into a single carry-on bag, be ruthless when packing. Most people lug all sorts of things away with them that they never use, especially clothes. My particular tips would be:

• If you need a suit, wear it (but with a t-shirt instead of formal shirt for comfort)
• Forget an alarm-clock, use your phone or PDA
• Take ebooks instead of paper ones
• Take small toiletry items, not full-sized ones
• Use hotel laundry services to cut down on changes of clothes
• For multi-day trips, remember you can always buy more toiletries when there
  (and 4- and 5-star hotels will provide everything as standard or on request)

Take advantage of faster check-in methods

Checking-in can be time-consuming and tedious, but with handbaggage only it can be a swifter and more civilised affair.

At the very least, many airlines have handbaggage-only check-in desks. These tend to have much shorter queues, and move faster as there's no hold luggage to check-in, and very few people using these desks are the type of people who can't find their ticket, have an expired passport and have turned up on the wrong day ...

Better still, a number of airlines have self-service check-in machines. Not only does this tend to be quicker, but I haven't yet met one that wanted to weight my hand-baggage.

Or most civilised of all, check-in online or by phone. You can often check-in 12, 18 or even 24 hours in advance, and most online check-in services allow you to print your own boarding pass. With this option, you don't even need to use a machine at the airport - just go straight through security.

It's worth joining the frequent-flyer programme for each airline you fly, even if you will never want to use the miles. The systems usually remember your seat preferences, and will often pre-assign your preferred seat at the time of booking. They often also allow you to do an earlier online check-in.

For day trips, it is usually possible to check-in for your return flight at the same time - airlines know that people flying out to a business meeting are not going to fail to show for the return flight.

Defeating hand-baggage limits

While accepting that hand-baggage weight limits are well-intentioned, intended to minimise the risk of injury in the event of a crash, I can't help feeling that the chances of (a) finding oneself in a plane crash at all, (b) a surviveable one and (c) only being injured because someone's carry-on case weighed 12kg instead of 10kg has to rank fairly low on the list of life's hazards. Yet from the Stalinesque enforcement found at many check-in counters, you might be forgiven for thinking you were trying to take a bomb on board ...

There are a number of simple things you can do to minimise the likelihood of being forced to put your luggage in the hold ...

• First, don't try to defeat the size limit unless you have a squashable bag with squashable contents. If a rigid bag's too big, there's nothing you can do to make it smaller, and an over-sized bag will almost always be spotted. With a correctly-sized bag, check-in staff often settle for a quick visual check, and if they don't then there are things you can do to make it lighter (see point 4 ...).

• Second, choose airlines with generous official policies. BA, for example, allows Club Class passengers to carry two 9kg bags. (Unfortunately, the stupid UK rule of a single item of handbaggage defeats this if flying from the UK.)

• Third, choose airlines with generous unofficial policies, ie. ones noted for not weighing hand-baggage. BA used to belong to this category but has got much stricter in recent years. American and German airlines are particularly strict, Far Eastern airlines generally much less so.

• Fourth, lighten your bag at check-in. If two carry-on bags are allowed, the simplest way to do this is to carry a lightweight fold-up bag in your case and put your laptop, power supply any anything else heavy (books, papers, etc) into this. You can transfer things back once checked in. This is my standard approach. If only one bag is permitted, carry your laptop and any documents under your arm, and transfer any small heavy items into coat or jacket pockets.

For economy and charter travel, more devious methods may be required. For example, my roller-bag weighs 4kg empty, and the charter limit may be as low as 6kg! Ploys I have used successfully are:

• If travelling in a group, just show a small bag at check-in while one of your mates looks after your real one. :-) This occasionally gets picked up at the gate, but checks there are far less frequent.

• Since Duty Free carrier-bags are normally ignored, transfer heavy items into this until checked-in.

I must confess that one particularly humourless charter check-in person annoyed me sufficiently to get silly about it. When she absolutely refused to let me take the bag on board over the weight limit, I removed sufficient clothes to get the bag below the limit and then put the rest on as extra layers. She was really annoyed as she knew I was going to take them off again afterwards, but there is no limit on how many layers of clothes a passenger I can wear, so there wasn't a thing she could do about it. :-)

Red-eye flights: just say 'maybe' ...

My advice on overnight flights used to be 'just say no'. Sleeping fitfully and uncomfortably, coupled to a significant time-zone change, is a recipe for leaving you zonked for the next 2-3 days.

However, if you are flying in business class and can fly with an airline that offers proper flat-bed seats, then this can actually be quite a sensible way to travel.

BA's Club World, for example, gives you a 6-foot long bed, and provided you get a window seat, you effectively have your own little 'cabin' when you fold the privacy screen down. It's surprising how effective this is in insulating you from the rest of the cabin and creating a relaxing environment in which to sleep.

I also have a pair of pyjamas which I bought specifically for overnight flights. If there's one thing worse than sleeping in your clothes, it's waking up in them. So once the cabin lights are dimmed, I take that as my cue to nip to the loo to get changed and then sleep comfortably.

However, if the only option is an ordinary seat, my previous 'just say no' advice applies ...

Minimise the effects of jet-lag

Jet-lag can be greatly reduced by switching time-zones immediately you board the aircraft. If you adjust your watch straight away, you get used to the new time and it will feel much more natural than if you switch at the last minute on arrival.

On arrival, try to adjust immediately to the local time in terms of sleep. Try to avoid sleeping during the day. This isn't generally too difficult on something like London to NY: it's just staying up an extra few hours. But even on something like London to Singapore, when you are arriving the following morning, I try to stay awake through the day and only go to bed in the early evening. It makes for a very long and tiring day, but by the following morning you're fully-adjusted.

Incidentally, it is worth the effort of changing the time-zone on your laptop and pda as well, otherwise things can get very confusing - as a purely hypothetical example, you don't want your pda alarm-clock going off at UK time when you're in New York ...

Dealing with creased clothing

If you can get away with a silk shirt, these are ideal travel wear: they weigh nothing, take up virtually no space and - when rolled up rather than folded - barely crease.

You can buy clothes designed for travelling made from a material that doesn't crease. You can even get Italian suits made from this material, and mine is absolutely brilliant - I've crossed the Atlantic in it and arrived looking unrumpled (well, my suit did, anyway).

But if clothes do become creased, don't worry - creases can be effortlessly removed in about 20-30 minutes. Just put the clothes on hangers, hang them in the bathroom, put the shower on maximum heat and full power and close the door: the creases just drop out.

Don't live out of a suitcase

When you're doing four countries in five days, it can seem a bit pointless to unpack. The temptation is to simply rifle through your bag when you need something. After all, why unpack when you're going to have to repack early the next morning. This was my attitude for a long time.

But after a while I realised that I feel much more at home in a hotel room if I unpack everything I may need while I'm there, and have things set up pretty much as I do at home. It's surprising how much difference it makes.

Of course, this does introduce the risk of leaving something behind. I deal with this in two ways. First, everything I carry has a fixed place in my bag. I know where my iPod charger should be, for example, so if it's not there when I pack, I'll notice it. Second, I do a careful sweep of the room before I leave - something which is doubly necessary if you are as hopeless at mornings as I am, so I do it twice ...

Keeping in touch

Business travel can be a lonely experience, especially when you only stay a night or two in each country. Keeping in touch with your partner and/or friends can make a big difference.

For phone calls, mobiles are usually cheaper than hotel phones.

Many hotels now offer wifi connectivity, so with a laptop you can have broadband access in your room (or sometimes only in the public areas). This enables you to keep in touch via email, text chat (ICQ, msn, etc) and Skype.