This holiday season saw thousands of unlucky souls stuck at the airport for hours as flight after flight was delayed due to the fierce winter storms. Whether you were unfortunate enough to be one of these individuals or if you’ve experienced similar problems in the past, we all know that the sad truth is that flight delays are just a fact of life. Many of us at one time or another have arrived at the airport exactly on time and made our way to the gate only to find that we suddenly have an hour or more of extra time to kill.

It’s an annoying situation for anyone, but especially tedious for anyone with a tight schedule and a heavy workload. Even if you plan ahead to get work done while waiting, you are limited by the fact that you can’t bring your entire office phone system with you to the airport. Or can you?

Thanks to cloud technology, you can access these services from anywhere without them being physically present. Take, for example, the Cloud Hosted IP PBX. Since this system delivers service through a provider maintained cloud rather than a physical in-office network, you have much more flexibility in how you access it.

One of the key components of this system is the online CommPortal, which lets you manage your calls and other features. You can use CommPortal to forward your office calls to your cell phone, as well as place calls from your cell that show as coming from your office number, which allows you to respond to important calls as they come in instead of letting them pile up while you’re trapped in a terminal. You can even catch up on your voicemails, either by listening to them through CommPortal itself or setting up the option to have them forwarded as WAV files to your email address.

While you probably won’t want to bring a fax machine to the airport, you can still receive faxes through CommPortal. Faxes can either be viewed as PDF files or forwarded to an email as TIF files, depending on your preference.

With the ability to access your office phone features on the go, the Cloud Hosted IP PBX from AireSpring can turn a delayed flight into a productive opportunity. At the very least, it will help take your mind off those terribly uncomfortable seats in the terminal, if you are lucky enough to find an unoccupied one.