THIS year’s Business and Luxury Travel Mart (BLTM), to be held from October 24-25 at the Hyatt Regency Gurgaon, will feature hundreds of buyers from associations, event management companies, travel planning departments of corporates, luxury agencies and more.

Leading trade bodies like the Society for Incentive Travel Excellence India, Network of Indian MICE Agents, India Association Network, Indian Golf Travel Association and the Travel Agents Association of India, have also confirmed their attendance and will be curating education and networking sessions during the two-day event.

Meanwhile, the support and participation of other travel industry associations like Global Business Travel Industry Association, Outbound Tour Operators Association of India and the Indian Association of Tour Operators, is being finalised.

Some of the hosted buyers who have confirmed their participation include Tata Motors, Red Bull India, RBS Services India, Total Oil India, Tata Communications, BCD Meetings & Events, Fountainhead Entertainment and Hewlett Packard, among many others.

Among those who have confirmed their participation as sellers at BLTM include AccorHotels, Chancery Hotel Bangalore, Lemon Tree Hotels/Redfox Hotel, Ottila, Pride Group of Hotels, Shanti Maurice, The Ambassador Hotel Group, The Lodhi Hotel, The Royal Orchid, Travel Motivations and Variety Cruises.

NTOs from South Korea, Nepal, Malaysia and Zimbabwe have also confirmed their participation at the event.

“We are committed to creating BLTM as India’s premier show focused on business, MICE and luxury travel segments,” said Sanjiv Agarwal, chairman of Fairfest Media, organisers of BLTM.

“Hundreds of genuine hosted buyers will be flown in from all parts of India and neighbouring countries. Additionally, the venue will provide a rich hinterland of high-value corporate buyers in thousands, who will be also accorded the same status as hosted buyers,” he added.

CORPORATE travel from the US and Europe to Asia has seen staggering growth so far this year, according to latest findings by business airliner VistaJet.

Despite global economic and political uncertainty, the company, which regularly serves over 90 per cent of the globe, reported triple digit percentage increments in flights from the US to Asia. Meanwhile, flights from the UK to China more than quadrupled and flights to India were up 50 per cent.

The strong growth is felt globally, with overall flight traffic for VistaJet up 23 per cent and passenger numbers up 20 per cent. This has resulted in the company’s sale of the largest single package of flight hours in its history.

“We are flying our customers to more places than ever before and had our biggest ever quarter in the three months to June 2016,” said VistaJet’s chairman and founder Thomas Flohr.

“We are particularly pleased to see the growth in flight traffic to India, Asia and the US. From the trends we are seeing in the market, we expect Asia and India to play increasingly significant roles in global business going forward, particularly destinations like Shanghai, Mumbai and Singapore, which have seen notable growth over the past six months.”

VistaJet added that this is an indicator that corporations are increasingly viewing access to an entire fleet rather than ownership of one or two aircraft as a priority. Even as more economic headwinds are on the horizon, businesses are not flying less, but rather, are taking a more fiscally prudent approach to corporate travel.

The average number of annual contractual flight hours rose for the airliner in the second quarter to 120 hours per new customer, according to the report, which reasoned that VistaJet’s subscription model is increasingly preferred to ownership, which carries greater financial burdens and asset risks.

Flohr commented: “Our continued growth in the first half of this year demonstrates both the resilience of the VistaJet business model, and that our commitment to delivering the best possible service for our customers, in a way that makes sense in uncertain times, is clearly valued.”

“It also shows that there is an ongoing need for business aviation, that companies will always seek to grow and pursue new opportunities and it’s just a question of finding the right, financially prudent solution to access these,” he adds.

Wanda Tulfo Teo

THE first order of business for the Philippines’ newly appointed Department of Tourism (DoT) secretary are housekeeping matters affecting the daily operations of the agency.

Wanda Teo, who took office in July, embarked on a marathon of meetings with internal heads to conduct a “reality check”, according to a DoT statement, to ascertain if its resources are used efficiently for tourism-related projects and activities.

One of the first actions taken was the scrapping of the processing fee for the issuance of certificates of travel tax exemption and reduced travel tax, which came into effect since July 25.

There is also an ongoing discussion to integrate the terminal fee into the passenger’s airline ticket payment in hopes to simplify travel regulations and ease the queuing and delays at Philippine airport terminals.

Outside of internal workings, Teo also met with Tourism Authority of Thailand officials and the Thai minister of tourism and sports, Kobkarn Wattanavrangkul, who offered collaboration between the two countries in farm tourism, youth development as well as women and indigenous community projects.

Representatives from the Thai Travel Agents Association also met up with Teo to discuss how tour operators can send more Thai tourists to the Philippines.

She also travelled to the US to explore opportunities for tourism advocacy among the Filipino-American community and to see if medical tourism is a possibility for Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike residing on the country’s east coast.

Teo asserts that the DoT will be emphasising on domestic tourism too, and that the agency will be geared towards “shared tourism” to ensure that the economic benefits of tourism are felt by marginalised members of local communities.

TRAVEL industry players have welcomed a government initiative to create more tourism vocational training centres in Cambodia.

In a bid to improve hospitality service standards and address the lack of adequate training, the Ministry of Tourism (MoT) has unveiled plans to create two additional training facilities that will be operational by 2019.

Tourism minister Thong Khon said: “To resolve the issue, the government will allow the MoT to build two more vocational training centres in Phnom Penh and Sihanouk province, funded by the French Development Agency, with a capacity to train 1,300 people per year.”

The news comes as Swiss consultancy, Shift 360, made known plans to create an Academy of Culinary Arts, which will train up to 300 chefs annually from 2017.

And the MoT recently launched its One Staff, One Skill campaign alongside the Good Hospitality Initiative, which both promote tourism skills.

Alexis de Suremain, co-founder of MAADS Hospitality Group, said: “The lack of highly trained people in the hospitality industry in Cambodia is a real, ongoing challenge.”

Currently, many hotels and restaurants snap up star pupils graduating from training programmes carried out by organisations such as Friends International and EGBOK, which provide under-privileged youth with training opportunities.

Amy McLoughlin, co-founder of Ayana Journeys, said: “We are excited to learn about the introduction of more hospitality training centres, and support any efforts to up-skill the Cambodian workforce.

“I hope they will help generate more skilled employment opportunities for particularly young people. We hope to see more confident and entrepreneurial bright sparks coming out of the proposed centres.”

VISITORS to Thailand will need to pay increased visa-on-arrival fees starting September 27.

The fee currently costs 1,000 baht (US$28.8) and will be doubled to 2,000 baht. Arrivals from 19 countries will be affected, including those from Thailand’s largest source market China.

Other nations affected include Andorra, Bulgaria, Bhutan, Cyprus, Ethiopia, India, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Romania, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

Authorities said the 15-day visa is seeing a fee hike in hopes to ease congestion at immigration checkpoints, but the timing for the increase couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Thailand faced a series of bomb attacks less than two weeks ago at various tourist resort locations throughout the Kingdom.

The tourism ministry, while anticipating significant cancellations as a result, is still striving to achieve its target of 2.4 trillion baht of tourism revenue in 2016.

Incheon International Airport

SOUTH Korean tourists are turning their backs on Europe this year, frightened off by terrorist attacks in major cities and the attempted coup in Turkey.

Outbound travel agents are reporting declines of as much as 20 per cent in group bookings, with one research pinning the number at a massive 81.2 per cent drop in travel to Turkey.

“We have certainly been affected by events in Europe this year and numbers are worse than last year, particularly for areas on the Mediterranean and big cities in Western Europe,” Lee Eun-young, a sales executive for Hanjin Travel, told TTG Asia e-Daily.

Travel across Europe is down around 10 per cent, Lee said, hurt by the November 2015 attacks in Paris, bombings at Brussels in March and, most recently, the killing of 84 people in the French city of Nice in July.

Travel to Turkey – traditionally a popular destination for South Koreans – has been hard hit by the attempted coup in July.

Both Korean Air and Asiana Airlines reduced their flights between Incheon and Istanbul shortly after the bloodshed, with both carriers cutting their flights from five-times weekly to three.

“Unfortunately, I don’t see demand for Turkey recovering anytime soon,” said Lee.

Cho Il-san, spokesperson for Hana Tour, said bookings for European destinations were down as much as 20 per cent in Q1 but added that airlines are attempting to offset the decline in traffic by offering discounts on flights.

“On the other hand, travel to destinations in South-east Asia have picked up notably,” he said.

A study by SK Telecom has suggested that the fall in travel may be even more dramatic than agents are reporting.

By analysing the roaming data of its subscribers in July and August, the company said a mere 2,716 users visited Turkey, down 81.2 per cent from last year.

Visitors to France fell 25.1 per cent, the data showed, while South Korean arrivals in Belgium were 48.8 per cent lower.

Meanwhile, the number of visitors to Taiwan were up 21.8 per cent while arrivals in Vietnam climbed 12.4 per cent. Travel to China rose 8.4 per cent and to Japan by 7.2 per cent.

SATS has become the first inflight food caterer to take onboard celebrity chefs as culinary consultants, a move it says could help its customer airlines acquire and retain passengers amid mounting competition from LCCs.

An inaugural culinary panel of five celebrity chefs worked with Sats to create more than 100 dishes, which were yesterday showcased to over 100 airlines in Singapore. The master chefs on the panel are New Zealand’s Dean Brettschneider, Singapore’s Eric Teo, South Korea’s Gwak Man Keun and Indonesia’s Idham Mirwan.

Alex Hungate, president and CEO, Sats, said: “Air travel traditionally has been the most glamorous form of travel and that’s what it should remain if the industry is going to continue to be ‘healthy’ – particularly for full-service carriers competing against LCCs.

“You have to justify the ticket price. (Passengers) want more glamour, more sense of occasion (in their inflight experience) and food is a good (and cost-effective) way of doing that. That makes them want to use the same airline next time.”

The new offering can prove a strong differentiator particularly in the online marketplace, where consumers find it “easier than ever to browse options and compare offerings”, he added.

Sats is positive that its new dishes will speak well to today’s travellers. Hungate remarked: “A lot of people travel because they want to learn about and experience other cultures… they want (their inflight meal) to be authentic and special. Special famous dishes are a big reason why people fly.”

Since it was introduced in January this year, Sats’ new line of inflight meals has seen takeup from six airlines – including SilkAir and XiamenAir.

The gourmet meals have been offered as part of festive menus and as chef’s special items.

In particular, SilkAir had worked with Sats’ culinary team to finetune dishes in their All Time Favourites menu, which Rick Stephen, director of kitchens at Sats, said was “quite successful”.

“We expect to see a lot more takeup for upcoming festivities (and special occasions),” he said.

What could be in the way of airlines incorporating Sats’ premium meals are concerns with margins. However, the economies of scale that Sats enjoys would allow it to provide “better quality and more authentic meals at more reasonable prices for the airline”, Hungate assured.

Sats has capacity to produce about 100,000 meals a day, and this number is expected to increase with the completion of a new production line at one of its two inflight catering facilities.

Melbourne

ASIA-PACIFIC cities, especially those in Australia and Japan, continue to attain foremost positions on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) annual global ranking of the most liveable cities in the world.

The Global Liveability Ranking provides scores and ranks 140 cities worldwide according to lifestyle challenges faced by residents.

The 2016 report shows that the Australian cities of Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Sydney have taken the number 1, 5, 7 and 11 spots respectively with Melbourne retaining its crown. The top five cities remain unchanged from last year.

Meanwhile, Japanese cities such as Tokyo and Osaka have claimed the 13th and 14th positions. Also of note are the New Zealand cities of Auckland and Wellington, which took the 8th and 19th spots respectively.

Hong Kong and Singapore have moved up in ranking to occupy 43rd and 46th place, compared to 46th and 49th last year, respectively.

All the above cities have earned scores above 80, meaning “there are few, if any, challenges to living standards”, according to the EIU study.

In China, all eight Chinese cities surveyed registered a slight decline compared to last year. Tianjin saw the sharpest fall, down seven places, as a result of a decline in its environment score following an explosion in a chemical factory last August.

Suzhou has overtaken Beijing as the top ranked Chinese city at 72nd in the overall ranking. Beijing (73rd) is followed by Tianjin (77th), Shanghai (82nd), Shenzhen (84th), Dalian (88th), Guangzhou (93rd) and Qingdao (98th).

However, less than ten percentage points separate the liveability scores of all eight Chinese cities, highlighting that liveability standards within China do not vary substantially.

The EIU added that liveability has declined in 29 of the 140 cities surveyed over the last 12 months. This has largely come about as a result of heightened fears over terrorism with incidents in France, Turkey and Belgium being the most high-profile of over 1,000 reported attacks globally in 2016 alone.

These are compounded by other factors such as unrest in the US, political disruption in Turkey and Thailand and geopolitical disputes in Eastern Europe and Asia.