More than 7,600 people attended the first day of the premier global event for the tourism industry, which is geared towards exhibitors negotiating business with potential clients. The Exhibitor Invite only first day also saw more than 200 invited buyers engaging in an inaugural Speed Networking session, which was another opportunity for exhibitors and buyers to clinch deals.

Reed Travel Exhibitions director, Simon Press, said: “I am delighted with the attendance figures for the day of WTM 2011. World Travel Market is all about exhibitors doing business with WTM Meridian Club buyers. The exhibitor invitation policy for the day of WTM was introduced to allow exhibitors to negotiate business deals with those people they want to sign contracts with.”

Overall, almost 23,000 people attended the World Travel Market this year. The event also made a splash on social media site, Twitter, with WTM 2011 ‘trending’ as the 3rd most talked about topic on the day.

The first two traits naturally go together and they’re ideal for maximising space in your carry-on bag as well as taking from one client meeting to the next meeting. And being able to use the laptop at your airline’s departure lounge, during an international flight and still being able to do a quick email session at the airport while waiting for your bags to hit the carousel? That seals the deal.

So when will you be able to get a laptop that’s made for the long haul? When can you hit the road but leave the AC adaptor at home?

The answer to that question is today, depending on the price you’re prepared to pay and sometimes the compromises you’re willing to make. Some netbooks easily strut past the 10-hour mark but they lack the muscle, features and capabilities of a fully fledged laptop.

In some cases you can add a secondary battery which replaces the notebook’s CD/DVD drive or attaches to the notebook’s underside (this type of battery is sometimes called a ‘travel slice’) so you can hit the road with two full tanks of juice – although this adds to the laptop’s bulk.

But within the next few years that won’t even be an issue. The ever-onwards march of technology in computer chips and other components will make ‘all day computing’ a trait of almost every laptop.

“The challenge for us is to bring all-day battery life to the mainstream so that you take the laptop to work and leave the power supply at home,” says Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel’s Mobile Platforms group.

“But ‘all day’ means different things to different people,” Eden tells Dynamic Business. “For me it might be eight hours, for you it might be 10 hours. And we need to do even more than that, because as the laptop gets older the battery life will slowly get lower.”

Eden’s goal for Intel? “We need to deliver 10-to-12 hours without the charger. And we will be able to do that, because all-day battery life is not just possible, it is inevitable.”

The foundations are already in place. Intel’s family of Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 chips perform the neat trick of running faster than any previous generation of Intel silicon while drawing less power from the battery. And even that dollop of extra speed is being channelled into eking out extra battery life.

If you divide the laptop’s typical working day into tiny slices of time, most of that day is spent in varying states of idle rather than being actively used. More processing muscle means the notebook can do the heavy lifting faster so that it more quickly returns to the low-power idle state – and the more time it spends there, the longer the battery lasts.

Eden calls this feature “hurry up and get idle”, and it’s enhanced by ‘turbo boost’ modes which further accelerate the processor for short but intense bursts. These can be everyday tasks like opening an email attachment or previewing a PowerPoint deck as a set of thumbnails. Tasks that take six seconds suddenly take three or four: but it’s less about speed than sleep.

“The idea is wake the notebook up, do the job and then go to sleep again,” Eden explains. “If the chip does the job faster it can go back to sleep sooner, so you get better performance and you also get extended battery life. This is the real secret of energy efficiency.”

Yet the processor is just one part of the notebook. The screen is responsible for the largest portion of a laptop’s power drain, followed by the hard drive. Dramatic efficiencies in these areas are slower to come, with fewer breakthroughs and smaller leaps.

That said, notebook screens with LED backlighting draw less juice than the non-backlit models while also providing a brighter picture. And while ‘solid state drives’ (SSDs) draw almost no power compared to the conventional and battery-hungry spinning platters of a hard disk, their high price and relatively low capacity can make them impractical for many notebook users.

Seagate is leading the move towards a new wave of ‘hybrid’ hard drives where a high capacity hard disk is partnered with a slab of solid state memory which automatically stores the most commonly-used files and data.

There’s also a growing trend towards lightweight operating systems which let you dive into email, browse the web and play music or movies without loading Microsoft Windows. Typically based on the Linux operating system and embedded into a flash memory chip inside the laptop, these ‘instant on’ systems spring to life within seconds instead of the hard disk-hammering (and power sucking) minute that Windows often demands – making them a boon for short work sessions on the go.

Those are some of the technologies now converging into the next generation of notebooks. Give us a few years, the experts say, and almost every laptop will be built for the long haul.

Introducing the Ultrabook

If you’re in the market for a thin and light laptop you’ll soon start to hear a new bit of jargon being tossed around. It’s the ‘ultrabook’ – a notebook which is ultra thin and ultra light.

Conventional ‘thin and light’ laptops have a waistline less than 2cm and tip the scales at under 2kg, but ultrabooks blast past the 2+2 recipe. They’ll typically have a ‘flying wedge’ chassis tapering to 0.5cm and weighing closer to 1kg.

The posterchild for the ultrabook movement is the MacBook Air, although you won’t hear Apple spouting the ‘u-word’ – it’s a term used by the makers of Windows notebooks. The typical ultrabook will resume instantly from sleep mode, use flash memory SSD chips rather than spinning mechanical hard disks, run for four-to-six hours and be priced at around $1,000.

That specification is a tall order against the price-tag . Notebooks with those spec sets have usually belonged to the ‘ultra premium’ category with a much higher price tag. However, Apple has demonstrated that it’s entirely possible to produce a laptop that meets these requirements, with the entry level 11-inch MacBook Air selling for $1,150.

The first Windows-powered ultrabooks, from Acer and Asus, should be on sale by the time you read this, with models from Dell, HP and Toshiba tipped to follow before the year is out.

This article first appeared on Dynamic Business.

Brad Gurrie, general manager of Travelzoo, said Rudd’s reported travel bill of about $1 million could have been halved if he’d used the online service.

“It’s quite astounding the amount of money he paid for airfares and hotels. I know it’s very possible to still fly business or first class and stay in exorbitant hotels, all around the globe and not amass $80,000 per trip,” said Gurrie.

Travelzoo compiled the following table to compare prices (click to enlarge)

“On the above tabled trips alone, not including food or beverages and other expenses, the total for flights and luxury accommodation would have been around $45,000 for three trips. This is significantly lower than the reports of $80,000 per trip,” Gurrie said.

Although Travelzoo does not sell flights or take hotel bookings, as an aggregator it sources various travel deals for Australia and abroad and publishes them online.

Gurrie did admit that taking advantage of travel deals was not always possible for businesses but said many commercial customers could still benefit from the service if the price was right.

“Although many of these deals are focused on leisure consumers there is a tendency for many businesses to take advantage of the deals to save significant costs. Businesses need to weigh up the value associated with flexibility and have it offset with savings that exceed 50 percent,” he said.

“At Travelzoo we publish many deals that are widely available with little or no restrictions that make them ideal for businesses. The travel prices for Kevin Rudd did, in many cases, allow flexibility.”

Apart from Oprah’s visit, the features of this summer were recurring events that are increasingly becoming a fixture for Australian tourism. Add to that the rest of the year when the ‘business season’—trade shows, conferences and team-building workshops—kicks off, and you have a calendar of events to lure inbound tourists all year round.

“Event tourism is very attractive,” says Gary O’Riordan, deputy managing director of the Australian Tourism Export Council (ATEC). “In Australia events like the Olympics, the Rugby World Cup, the Commonwealth Games, generate very big numbers. People’s length of stay can be quite long compared to an average business or a leisure visitor and is generally quite high yielding as well.”

VIP entry

Events tourism is when a traveller comes to Australia and the primary purpose of their trip is not a holiday. For business visitors this is fairly clear cut; for people coming for sporting fixtures or a music festival, attendance at the Melbourne Cup or Big Day Out is considered ‘for leisure purposes’. This makes it hard to put a dollar value on the umbrella of events tourism.

“Sporting events and so forth would look at how many people went through the gate and work out the length of stay and they’d come up with a value of what they believe that event has generated for a particular city or destination,” says O’Riordan.

Business events are a lot easier to quantify as this information is generally collected on passenger arrival cards, and conference organisers know how many international guests attend as delegates and collect information on how many take the pre and post-conference tours. According to O’Riordan, in 2009 the value of business tourism to Australia was $8 billion, representing around 14 percent of Australia’s 6 million visitors. This took a hit during the global economic downturn, but started to recover last year.

“It’s still not back to pre-GFC levels but business and conference travellers are starting to come back,” he reports. In the 12 months to 30 November 2010 conference and convention arrivals were up 21 percent and business arrivals were up 14 percent.

Rob Harris, director of the Australian Centre for Event Management at the University of Technology, Sydney, says it is sometimes difficult to frame the value of events to their significance to the economy.

“The view of it from government funding is the capacity of events in general to attract new money, so many events now include a component around tourism dollars when doing evaluations,” he says.

Other ways to measure events include non-monetary means, such as promotional value. The Sydney Olympics, for example, had a role in driving future visits, due to increased awareness of Australia through the event coverage, Harris explains. “There would also be some future repeat visitation where people who came for the Olympics would return to do more extensive travel. Obviously they would be advocates for the country, telling friends and so on.”

Unfortunately this calculation isn’t straightforward. “You also have a repulsion effect, how an event may keep people who would otherwise come to a location away because there’s a belief that the accommodation is going to be more expensive, it’s going to be more crowded, it’s going to be more difficult to do things,” explains Harris. This happened during the Athens Olympics where many of the Greek Islands recorded a downturn “because they hadn’t got the message out there that it was business as normal”.

1. Indian student attacks

Two attacks on Indian students in Melbourne, seemingly racially motivated, threatened to curtail this multimillion-dollar industry in a significant source market. However, it was not just education, Australia’s third largest export and our highest value service export, at risk. Australia’s image in India was at least temporarily tarnished as this issue, unresolved since 2009, increased in profile.

Diplomacy was in full force as former acting Prime Minister and Minister for Education Julia Gillard, and acting Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Crean, met with their Indian counterparts to ease tension.

2. China versus Rio Tinto

In 2009, Chinese authorities arrested detained four Rio Tinto employees, including Australian executive Stern Hu, for five weeks before formally charging them with commercial bribery and trade secrets infringement. Hu attended a closed trial in March 2010 and accepted the Chinese court’s 10-year sentence.

The sentence came as a warning for exporters to avoid corrupt practices when doing business in China, particularly in the resources sector, which is Australia’s biggest earner in China.

3. Mining tax debacle

The resources sector came out in force against the Henry Tax Review suggestion that the sector pay 40 percent tax on its so-called ‘super profits’. The Federal Government decided to adopt the suggestion and the industry spent millions in a nationwide advertising campaign in protest. Economists believe the tax will curb some investments and affect mineral exports, which may have a trickle-down effect in the wider economy.

4. Rising Australian dollar

The Australian dollar reached parity with the US dollar in mid-October after months above US80c and US90c. The weakness of the US economy, in addition to flailing markets in the UK and eurozone (particularly Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain), boosted the Australian dollar in global markets, and threatened to chew at exporters’ margins. Competing on a lower dollar is no longer an option for exporters as near-parity is predicted to continue well into 2011.

5. Global travel woes

An ash cloud created by the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano most found difficult to say and spell, interrupted much of Europe’s airspace for five days in April. Airlines had to deal with thousands of stranded passengers and airfreight routes had to be re-routed or delayed.

Let’s not forget natural disasters in Haiti, China, and Pakistan, the Gulf oil spill, and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration body-scanning controversy added to the mix. On a domestic front, Virgin Blue suffered a system crash that saw several planeloads of passengers stranded in September.

Things to celebrate

But it wasn’t all bad. Exporters started the year with a larger backyard market thanks to the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (AANZFTA). Australia’s foray into China at the Shanghai World Expo and as country of honour at the China International Small and Medium Enterprises Fair was also successful, and we also launched a nation brand, Australia Unlimited, as distinct from our tourism campaigns.

Not that we forgot about tourism, which received a lot of attention in December when US talk show host Oprah Winfrey decided to visit for her last show, Oprah’s Ultimate Australian Adventure, bringing an entourage of 302 dedicated audience members and employing hundreds of US and Australian staff. Organised by Winfrey’s Harpo Productions in conjunction with Tourism Australia and local airline Qantas, the tour will be televised in January 2011.

What events rocked your exports in 2010?

For exporters conducting business across borders, a strategic approach to travel management will help to create savings as the market shifts into a new cost-cycle phase, following the Global Financial Crisis.

The most effective way to contain costs on your travel, whether your business is in the small to medium or mid to large market, is to use the expertise, travel information intelligence and negotiating capabilities of a travel management company (TMC).

An experienced TMC can help to guide you on all aspects of your travel program including bookings, visas, insurance, expense management and most importantly travel policy development.

Working closely with a TMC will enable you to implement procurement strategies that will continue to generate savings for you as the market recovers, demand increases and prices rebound.

Corporate travel specialist FCm Travel Solutions recommends exporters focus on four main areas of their travel program to generate immediate and longer term travel cost savings.

1. Demand management

The overall efficiency of your business travel is determined largely by your corporate culture. Employee attitudes towards when, where and how they fly, the airlines they choose to fly with and the hotels they stay in can dramatically affect the overall cost-effectiveness of your travel.

To help reduce unnecessary costs, it is essential your organisation fosters an internal culture that supports a consistent and centralised approach to travel.

Demand management is a holistic approach that not only addresses culture but also looks at factors such as the need for travel, volume and price. By applying demand management, you can improve how your business travels and manage your program to suit market conditions. Demand management involves

* assessing how people in your company travel. You can do this by working with a TMC to pinpoint areas where costs can be reduced

* considering what style of travel you value the most. Is it productive, flexible and safe business travel for your people or are your priorities focused on booking the lowest cost travel options across your air, hotel and car hire needs?

* creating a central travel policy that guides the way everyone in your organisation travels and provides greater ability to negotiate more competitive rates. In a changing market it is crucial that everyone abides by the policy to achieve maximum savings.

Scott is the director of the Sanctions and Transnational Crime Section in DFAT’s International Legal Branch.

The event is part of the Australian Institute of Export’s Future Leaders in Export club for active importers and exporters.

When:
8-9am
Thursday November 4, 2010

Where:
Coface Australia
Level 10, 68 York Street
Sydney

RSVP: Lisa McAuley at lisamcauley@aiex.com.au

In association with Euromonitor International, WTM last year foresaw a boost to African tourism due to the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the ‘Obama Effect’, where a surge in interest in ‘roots tourism’ or visits from Africans living abroad followed the election Barack Obama, the first US president with African heritage.

Other trends the report correctly predicted was the rise of the pop-up hotel, the advent of female-only accommodation and increased demand for pet facilities on airlines and destinations.

The 2010 WTM Global Trends Report will be launched at World Travel Market on November 8.

World Travel Market chairperson Fiona Jeffery said: “The launch of the 2010 World Travel Trends Report will provide the latest insight into the big trends for the year to come making it a must-attend event for the travel and tourism media.”

One of the most effective ways to reconnoitre a potential export destination is to become a member of a delegation or mission, an organised group travelling to a target country specifically for the purpose of prospecting the market, connecting with the business community in their industry and meeting potential clients, distributors or partners.

These initiatives can be jointly organised between the governments of Australia and another country (such as the Australian Pavilion at the China International SME Fair held 15-18 September this year), hosted by industry associations (such as the Australia China Business Council delegation to the World Expo in Shanghai, 1 May 31 October), conducted by a professional organisation with experience in leading delegations (the Think Global Consulting financial services delegation to Brazil in May) or organised by like-minded business people who can effectively access official endorsement for their group.

All of these modes of approach rely on hooking into existing networks. Think Global Consulting’s CEO David Thomas says, “Generally with delegations you can get access to people and organisations that you wouldn’t get access to on your own.”

Plus, he points out, going overseas in a group keeps the unit price down, as costs incurred can be spread across the number of participants.

Where to start

Start with your state government which will provide information and support through its own resources as well linking you up with Federal Government organisations such as Austrade, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Export Finance Insurance Corporation, the Australian Institute of Export as well as chambers of commerce.

At the regional level you will be able to access resources that enable you to ensure you and your business are positioned to venture into overseas markets. Trade and Investment Queensland, for example, has a network of regional export advisors who work with Austrade under the TradeStart contract, “and who work one-on-one with companies to help them get export ready, select appropriate markets and find overseas business partners”, says Tim de Jersey of Trade and Investment, Queensland.

TIQ runs an export education program, Getting Export Smart, specifically designed for SMEs. The four workshops cover preparation and choosing the right partners; marketing; pricing, freight, packaging and payment; and e-business. The AIEx also runs a program of export training courses.

Once you have identified the market you are interested in, look for events like trade shows in that country. “It helps to have an event like a trade show to build the mission around. That attracts the kind of people the delegation members need to connect with,” says Thomas. “The event provides one reason to be there and then you can build other things around it.”

If an Australian presence has been planned at the event, state government bodies such as TIQ can ensure your business has a place in the pavilion and provide introductions and government contacts in the overseas market.

Available resources

Finance: The level of assistance available from state governments varies. De Jersey cites Queensland’s funding under the government’s Business and Industry Transformation Incentives (BITI) program which helps develop businesses with growth potential.

The cost of participating in a mission may meet the criteria of the Federal Export Market Development Grant, which provides 50 per cent reimbursement to qualifying businesses whose expenditure exceeds the threshold.

AusIndustry also delivers innovation grants, tax and duty concession and venture capital products through $2 billion worth of assistance annually, and EFIC provides finance and insurance solutions to exporters, including additional funding unavailable from the business’ own financial institution.

Information: Austrade State Manager, New South Wales and ACT, David Howard, a former New York-based senior trade commissioner, says information is the most valuable resource for would-be exporters.

“Missions aren’t magic. Whatever you do has to be within a viable context of your own business. If you are going to go on a mission, why would you choose a particular market, and I think part of the answer to that is you have to research.”

Howard says Austrade has compiled a great deal of information into guides to different industries in different parts of the world and available on the website. “Beyond that we also have export advisors and a helpline where people can dial in. Any of the work we do in Australia or when you go offshore, if you want a basic market briefing or introduction to the market, there’s no real charge because it’s general information. The next step is if you want to commission something that is quite specific, such as the pricing survey, we have a flat rate of AUD190 an hour throughout the world.”

Austrade also has alliances and a corporate partnerships program working with consultants, accountancy firms and lawyers. “On the second tier we have a referral database that also covers freight and logistics providers. We’re always working with others to plug people into the right expertise,” Howard says.

“One of the major advantages that Austrade provides is its offshore network of people with an Australian commercial view of what’s happening in that market and they also have a good understanding of the business culture.” He says understanding of foreign business culture is critical. “It plays back to researching the market, how do distribution and orders work in that market?”

In the event of an emergency like the Mumbai terrorist attacks or the floods in Pakistan, the software enables businesses to quickly identify which of their travellers are at risk, minimising response time and saving valuable rescue resources for those who really need them.

Business travel is a necessary part of international trade, but corporations which overlook their duty of care to travelling employees can face litigation when something goes wrong.

Developed in partnership by Dynamiq and conTgo, the software combines interactive technology and emergency management procedures to enable “very active” travel management, according to Dynamiq CEO Anthony Moorhouse.

MapCast gathers all travel information for a single traveller—itineraries, flights, check-ins and corporate travel policies—into an interactive web-based interface. The data builds an interactive map, updated every few minutes, allowing you to literally draw a circle on a map and identify your employees travelling in a particular region.

The list of travellers can be further specified by airline or by travel time. The software also integrates corporate travel policies, and can deliver automatic, real-time location-based reminder messages to ensure adherence to travel policies.

MapCast will be made available to Travel Management companies to rebrand and market under their own umbrella management programs. In Australia, travel management company QBT have exclusive rights to the software until January and plan to deploy it by the end of the month.

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