Business Traveller

Travel shorts: Edifice Luxe

The latest in an occasional series of short stories written by business travellers, fictionalising their globe-trotting experiences

Edifice Luxe by Genny Briar

Top 10 airport touchdowns

A tiny airstrip in the Outer Hebrides topped a list of the most stunning airport landings in a poll out today

The survey* of 1,000 travel fans and pilots, conducted by the private jet hire booking network, PrivateFly.com, asked voters to choose from a shortlist of 28 or nominate an airport of their choice.

Winner Barra airport received just over 22% of the vote. Licensed as an airfield in 1936, planes touch down on the beach at Traigh Mhor at the northern end of the island. These days, according to media reports, Barra welcomes around 10,000 air arrivals a year.

Commenting on the results, Adam Twidell, CEO of PrivateFly.com and an experienced pilot, said: “A thrilling view on approach is a huge part of the joy of flying – for passengers and pilots alike. It’s interesting to note that most of the airports on the list are smaller ones rather than major international airline hubs.”

Michael Galbraith, station manager for Barra airport, agrees: “It goes to show that when it comes to a stunning landing, small can definitely be more beautiful,” he said in a statement.

Here’s the top 10; click on the links to view footage of the air approaches:

1.       Barra airport (Scotland, UK)

Great British pubs, but is UK Plc no place for the public house?

Pubcos, regulations and shiny globalisation might be enemies of the ‘local’ – but the perfect British pub is still out there

British pubs and brewery group Greene King are doing well this year. Asked why they were enjoying higher half-year profits, the 212-year-old Suffolk based firm told reporters this week that hard-pressed consumers struggling to cope with economic pressures were seeking solace in their local pubs.

Pubs have always been a place to escape the workaday, to celebrate our wins, cushion our losses. But is, as the headlines routinely scream, British pub culture now seriously under threat?

Answers come by the tankard in “The Search for the Perfect Pub”, a recently released pub crawl-meets-liquid social history. In it, Paul Moody and Robin Turner trawl the Kingdom to distil how business interests, weak political will and an authenticity sapping idea of “progress” have ganged up on the traditional watering hole, threatening our last vestige of freedom, a “liquid escape from the daily grind.”

This, the authors think, is something even non pub-goers should resent; each boarded up public house severs another link to our shared community-drinking heritage, a gut-lining history than can be traced back on these islands to the Roman roadside tabernae circa 43 AD.

In the two years the writers spent ascertaining just how much pubs matter to us, they had to fight against the brave new identikit boozers and dive deep to locate the real, rustic wheat amongst the sports-bar chaff. Their book is subtitled “Looking for The Moon Under Water”; George Orwell’s search for a utopian pub of that name (he fantasised about it in an Evening Standard column in 1946) mirrors their own.

Pub chain JD Wetherspoon today owns 14 The Moon Under Waters – though none will match up to Orwell’s stringent list of attributes of which has the perfect pub, where motherly barmaids call you ‘dear’ and which sells “tobacco as well as cigarettes.” As Robin Turner writes in a blog entry, “In days of ‘vertical drinking establishments’, most people’s experience of pubs is about as far from the Orwell version as it’s possible to get.”

Business aviation to embrace Air Passenger Duty

By Adam Twidell, CEO, PrivateFly.com The opinions expressed are his own.

The Chancellor shouldn’t drag his heels on the timings around APD for business jet flights in the UK

In Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn statement (November, 29), he announced the extension of Air Passenger Duty (APD) to trips taken aboard business jets, effective from April 2013.

The extension of APD to business aviation was announced in the March 2011 Budget with many expecting it to come into operation in April 2012 alongside the increases in APD bands for airline passengers (the details of which will be announced imminently). Some commentators are seeing this as a delay.

The timings may be unclear but the Chancellor need not drag his heels. If APD is to be calculated the same way for private jet passengers as it is for airlines, it would add a relatively small increase to the costs of a private charter flight and would be unlikely to cause much alarm to passengers.

Currently, the duty applies to airline flights in bands according to both the distance of the journey and the class of seat. Average passenger payload is 2.8 per flight, so the impact on a return flight from London to Paris would be to increase the cost overall by 3.5 percent (£134.40 on a typical £3,900 return journey).

Following Tuesday’s announcement, I believe that two areas remain unclear:

Cathay Pacific launch in-flight audio books

At a travel industry dinner a couple of months ago, I was sitting next to the boss of a large book publisher. During the course of the meal, we agreed that airlines’ movie/music/games-centric entertainment offering is an injustice to the bookish.

Why not beam e-books onto passengers’ personal devices, we wondered. Or, even better, stock audio books.

So it was nice to see Cathay Pacific Airways announce today that a collection of audio books will be on all their Audio and Video on Demand-equipped medium- and long-haul flights from December. This adds to their expansive library of 100 movies, over 500 TV programmes, 888 music CDs, 22 radio channels and programmes in nine languages.

Audio books will be in English, but the airline tells me that should they prove popular they will consider launching titles in other languages.

The first batch of spoken-word stories span best-sellers, how-to tomes, autobiographies and classics:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Vol. I – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne

The golden age of aviation?

It is 1963. Transatlantic flights are a commercial possibility for the affluent and Pan Am is the biggest name in the business. Their pilots, mostly war trained, are rock stars. Passengers fly with ebullient style; dress to impress, eat restaurant-quality food, drink good liquor and have their cigarettes lit by charming, trilingual young ladies.

The airing of the ABC television series “Pan Am” is dosing older audiences with Jet Set nostalgia, and raising the eyebrows of younger ones with its scenes of air stewardesses undergoing preflight weigh-ins, grooming inspections and girdle checks (a bottom slap).

As the show’s star, Christina Ricci – she plays a purser – said in a media interview: “[the girls] had to be these intelligent, gracious hostesses who could be… emissaries in a way and I don’t think I realised that and I think that a lot of people won’t realise that until they watch the show.”

Pan Am flight attendants were all of a certain weight (between 110 and 135 pounds), health (excellent) and personality (extremely charming)… and single. Though they looked the part, modern audiences may squirm at the sexism and gender discrimination on display.

The Association of Flight Attendants released a statement on the show following its premiere in September. Pan Am, it wrote, “highlighted the myriad of social injustices overcome by the strong women who shaped a new career.”

Despite the union’s justifiable pride in how far the rights of flight attendants have come, can one detect a hint of nostalgia for travel’s “golden age”? The statement continues: “The fictional, glamorized world of Hollywood’s Pan Am is a far cry from today’s realities of air travel that ditches high fashion for ‘low cost,’ jam-packed airplanes and massive cuts to Flight Attendant staffing.”

In an interview with Movieweb.com, Pan Am’s executive producer Jack Orman points to the larger truth behind the fiction: “They got it right the first time. Transcontinental commercial flights started in the late ’50s and we really haven’t gotten any faster… I think the appeal of Pan Am as a brand is the idea that travelling was fun and glamorous and entertaining and in a more innocent time certainly before all the security and all the rigmarole that you have to go through to get through the airport.”

How much for that hotel room?

Released today, Hotels.com’s Hotel Price Index (HPI) shows increased corporate demand has sparked sizeable room-rate rises in certain hotspots.

Though hotel rates in the first six months of 2011 rose by just 3 percent globally, the HPI* points to Sao Paolo’s impressive 27 percent rise, and Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney which show double-digit price increases.

Nigel Pocklington, senior vice president, global marketing at Hotels.com says there are several factors at play here:

“The relative strength of currencies, particularly in Sydney where you have a weaker pound up against a stronger Australian Dollar… and limited supply, especially in Sao Paulo and Hong Kong, also pushed up demand and fuelled prices.”

Across BRIC nations, the HPI reveals Brazil was up 7 percent to 132 pounds, Russia was up 11 percent to 141 pounds, India was up 2 percent to 85 pounds and China was up 4 percent to 92 pounds.

Corporate demand is inelastic regarding hotel prices per se, with employers more concerned about macroscopic economic indicators, but though business travel fell alarmingly during the last recession, Pocklington reaffirms that: “Business travel has gone up 10 percent this year, and there are no signs that businesses are making the same mistakes again.”

Hotels.com (part of the Expedia group) says the survey’s findings are consistent with the Global Business Travel Association’s projection that worldwide business travel spending will rise 9.2 percent in 2011.

A borderless future: Transforming the customer experience in the rail industry

By Anne Pruvot, infrastructure & transportation services, Accenture

By 2019, the EU’s rail traffic will be deregulated. What issues does this raise for the operator and their customers?

Imagine this: A rail service to suit all budgets, where a traveller with just one electronic ticket can enjoy a swift, safe and sustainable journey to just about any destination on the network.

Thanks to a combination of deregulation, common standards for train control and command systems, and the extension of high-speed track, much of the world’s rail industry – and its passengers – stand on the threshold of just such a bright and borderless future.

The European Union’s national train companies are now free to pick up passengers in other countries as long as the journey originates in their domestic market; and by 2014, the ability to conduct a journey between two domestic points will be extended to foreign companies.

High-speed lines are starting to facilitate faster, cleaner travel between major cities from Spain to Finland. So much so that on some key routes rail travel is fast gaining market share as a low-cost, low-carbon alternative to both air and road transport. As more countries sign up to the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) cross-border interoperability looks set to become a reality right across the continent.

Crowd control: Is London travel-ready for Summer 2012?

London Assembly’s transport committee grilled London and Olympic travel executives on Tuesday about what Transport for London (TfL) calls “100 days of extraordinary operation,” a period which includes both the 2012 Games and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

The Transport Committee, which presses for travel improvements for Londoners, heard that the hardware is there but more needs to done to ensure London’s transport infrastructure can take the strain during a period when a third of Londoners will be obliged to significantly change their travel patterns.

UK transport bosses must tread a fine line enacting programmes which both address strict Games regulations and the needs of Londoners. It is a balancing act, but one in which local politicians see scope for common-sense tweaks.

As committee chair Caroline Pidgeon told me, “They’re not going to take the Games away from us if we do some things that aren’t quite what we signed up to. So let’s have some sense in this, and push boundaries.”

Pidgeon was referring in particular to the Olympic Route Network (ORN) and Paralympic Route Network (PRN), roads unencumbered by pedestrian crossings and parked cars, with side roads blocked off and turning options deactivated. The network is causing particular consternation to London councils, despite the fact that they will operate on just one percent of London’s tributaries.

Which roads when? To complicate matters, “Games Lanes” make up a third of the 109-mile long ORN and are only accessible to the 80,000-strong Games Family (Olympics athletes, team officials, media, sponsors) and their fleet of 1,500 coaches and 4,000 cars and vans.

“Everyone understands athletes and officials should be able to use Games Lanes,” Pidgeon said. “But sponsors and VIPS; quite honestly some of them should be using things like the short train journey from St Pancras, which will be far more pleasant than driving all that way.”

Top 5 noise-cancelling headphones

By Grace Nasri at FindTheBest

One of the most irritating things about business travel – of air travel in general, really – is flying when your seatmate is a crying baby or a non-stop chatter and you’re trying to work, sleep or just enjoy the in-flight entertainment.

But even when you’re not sitting next to a teething infant or gabby neighbour, the hum of the plane engine can be distracting.

Whether you need complete silence to get that report done before you land, hope to catch up on some sleep during a cross-country red-eye, or simply want all outside noises blocked so you can watch Casablanca in peace, noise-cancelling headphones can help.

According to data provided by FindTheBest – a data-driven comparison engine – when consumers are looking to purchase headphones, the most common feature they search for is noise-cancelling functionality. Fifty-two percent of consumers researching headphone features look into noise-cancelling functionality; that’s more than the amount of searches for the next three top researched features: Wireless (20 percent), microphone (18 percent) and volume remote (11 percent).

But there are several other factors to take into consideration when looking for a quality set of headphones for business travel – from the weight and style of the headphones to its frequency range and sensitivity. The headphones below are the top Smart Rated noise-cancelling headphones; the Smart Rating takes into consideration product features – including the features above – as well as the reviews and ratings of experts.

Top 5 Smart-Rated, Noise-Canceling Headphones: