The business of travelling for work
City is the business
PROVO, UTAH has been ranked as the best US city for business by Forbes. The third largest city in Utah, the home of Brigham Young University (above) topped the list due to a strong economy and a low crime rate.
Elements considered in the research were job growth, living costs, ranked educational establishments, crime rate and cultural opportunities. The bottom five cities included three in California, the last of which, Stockton city, filed for bankruptcy last Tuesday.
Counting the cost of travel stress
CARLSON WAGONLIT Travel is developing the CWT Travel Stress Index to support companies in their duty of care responsibilities. It will help to quantify the cost to organisations of the stress employees can suffer when travelling, such as reduced productivity, absenteeism, injuries and illness, and assist companies to make better travel policy decisions. More details on CWT-solutions-groups.com.
Meanwhile, an announcement is expected this week that CWT Ireland has been appointed to handle the Government business travel account. The account has been with Club Travel for more than 20 years. CWT manages travel in 150 countries with annual billing of more than $90 billion.
Research last week in the US and Europe show there will be little or no growth in business travel in 2012. The Global Business Travel Association Europe report says that only the UK and Germany will be showing growth in business travel, and even then, it is less than one per cent.
In the US, Delta and United Airlines have begun reducing capacity for the latter end of the year by one per cent due to the weakening economic outlook. However, the news is not all bad. The GBTA report notes that business travel is expected to grow by on average four to five per cent in 2013.
Room to expand
MARRIOTT REWARDS members will be happy to hear that the global hotel operator plans on having 4,000 hotels in 90 countries across the 14 brands by 2014 with 115,000 rooms in the development pipeline. One hundred of the hotels will be in China. Marriott has one million Chinese members in its 38 million guest loyalty programme.
Olympic bargains
DOWN TO THE last 20 days to the Olympics and "prices are falling in all classes of hotels", says Seamus Mac Cormaic of Hotels.com.
“We are seeing promotional prices start to come through and expect the trend to continue. People should not be put off travelling to London,” he continued.
The London organising committee has released rooms back into circulation, many hotels have lifted length-of-stay restrictions and demand has not been as strong from groups.