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| New planes, new markets, more ways to fly – corporate aviation’s role is re-emerging. |
After experiencing significant turbulence during the recession, the private aviation industry changed course in 2012, as many executives have once again begun to rely on private jets for their travels to business opportunities around the world. It was around 2008 when business aviation started to nose dive in the aftermath of Sarbanes-Oxley and comments by politicians that corporate jets were merely the playthings of rich, fat-cat businessmen. However, with runway capacity at a premium in emerging market...
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| What’s it take to do business in five cities that drive the most dynamic economies in the world? |
It’s was Nov. 30, 2001, when Goldman-Sachs Asset Management chair Jim O’Neill issued the innocuously-titled Global Economics Paper No. 66, coining a phrase that’s since entered the lexicon as the definition of on-fire emerging markets. The term BRIC – and later BRICS – is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and the most recent addition to the club, South Africa. In the span of the decade since, the BRICS economies have grown from 8 percent of the world’s GDP to 25 percent in 2011. However, the la...
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| Businesses are going the world over and travel management companies are ready to take them there. |
Corporations need to travel to where the business opportunities exist — that’s nothing new. However, these days those opportunities can be in more remote or less traveled areas, such as in the case of mining or oil and gas companies. When it comes to operating on a global landscape, the demands placed on travel management companies (TMCs) are as strong as ever, and these companies must be constantly looking at ways to adjust their business models to meet the needs of their corporate clients. “Companies t...
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| More than a mere convenience, powerful new mobile tools are changing fundamental traveler behavior. |
Twenty years ago, the first inroads of the desktop-bound Internet-based search-and-book tools were just coming online for travelers and travel departments. Today the desktop has been replaced by the smartphone, and predictions call for an even more seismic shift that will once again turn managed travel on its ear. These new tools are not just a change in form-factor, but a change in the how and why of booking. Mobile and tablet apps have quickly gained popularity, as companies seek to accommodate t...
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| Is your international travel program all in or should you be placing some strategic bets? |
Trends come and go. What’s hot today will be cold tomorrow. We’ve all had the experience of the shiny new must-have toy that’s so popular now, but then its allure fades and it’s soon forgotten. Today’s technology and personal items such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, cameras, etc. – something purchased this holiday will seem obsolete or outmoded in a mere 12 months, if even that long. The same cycle – or fickleness, if you want to call it that – exists in the business world. Publishers continue ...
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| Business travel in China continues to grow, but there are bumps in the road ahead |
According to the Chinese calendar, 2012 is a year represented by the powerful and benevolent Dragon. The symbolism is potent; in Chinese mythology, the Dragon is an auspicious sign of authority and good luck. Recently, however, other signs have been pointing in a less promising direction for the global economy and with it, the continued growth of China on the world stage. Nonetheless, there’s no doubt that what’s happening in the Middle Kingdom today is creating vast changes – and challenges – for global...
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| The RFPs you sent out to select your new TMC are coming back. Now what? |
Last month’s article discussed the process of setting up a proper request for proposal (RFP) for your travel sourcing needs. The main idea was to explain which RFP tool to use in different situations, and how best to structure the questions to receive meaningful responses from bidders. Now that we have laid the foundation for an RFP, we’ll turn our attention to a specific travel category — the travel management company (TMC). Here, we discuss not only how to structure the best RFP for this category, but ...
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| As business treks to the ends of the earth, will global travel policies stretch that far? |
Corporations have been trying to manage travel and entertainment expenses globally for about 20 years. While tremendous progress has been made implementing global supplier contracts, consolidating bookings through fewer travel management companies (TMCs), and effecting consistent worldwide policies, certain challenges remain intractable and some savings remain elusive. Many of these unresolved issues are self-inflicted, the result of manual tasks and broken links in the reservations and data capture proc...
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| For MCO, the Mouse is only part of the pictures these days. |
Here’s the essential thing you want to remember about Orlando International: flyers don’t change planes here a lot. Most of the traffic – in fact, 95 percent of it – at North America’s 13th busiest airport is flying to or from central Florida, rendering it an overwhelmingly O&D (origin & destination) aerodrome. That makes for some interesting booking twists. Because two-third’s of MCO’s traffic is leisure or VFR (visiting friends and relatives), Saturday mornings can be saturated. Matter of...
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| The squabbles over distribution might transform things for other industry players — like TMCs and you. |
As in the old fable about the blind men describing the elephant, the picture of the travel industry’s global distribution system (GDS) looks like different things to different people. Thirty years on, the airlines that first begat GDSs see their offspring as overblown and overpriced. The GDSs see themselves as indispensable aggregators of information with superior technology. And for the other players in the travel industry – travel management companies (TMCs) and the corporate clients they serve – techn...
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