Corporate e-Newsletter - Summer 2007

Congratulations to Phil Carr of Crosswater Ltd, Dartford, who won our eNews subscribers' prize in our 2007 2nd Quarter draw. Every quarter we draw a winning name. The odds are much better than winning the lottery, so anyone who has not subscribed to our free eNews, now is the time to be in with a chance of winning the subscribers' prize draw for the 3rd Quarter 2007!

The voucher certificate will have a value of £100, redeemable against any form of holiday (combination of travel and accommodation) booking made through us to the value of £500 or more, and will be valid for a period of 18 months from the date of issue. It will be transferable, providing the winner advises Medway Travel of the name of the eventual recipient.

From a City break to a Cruise, from an all-inclusive package to a tailored holiday, the choice is yours. We have a massive range of outstanding holidays to offer and a team of consultants highly qualified to research and advise on all aspects of your trip. The chances of your being the lucky winner in the next 12 months are better than 1 in 500, so the very best of luck!

Our accounting procedures and capability have been changing over the last couple of years, mainly due to the advances in technology allowing us to provide a 21st Century solution. You may have noticed some of the changes with e-mailable invoices and statements, but have you noticed some of the others?

Payment via Airplus, would allow your accounts department to concentrate on making money rather than allocating it, with seamless electronic invoicing and the ability to reconcile your business travel transactions more easily. All transactions can be viewed online at any time via the AirPlus Business travel portal and you can import your data directly into Excel to evaluate as you wish.

Payment via Direct Debit, with the ability to hold invoices that are in dispute, giving you peace of mind that your agreed invoices are always settled on time and reduce the risk of our service to you being disrupted.

The invoices have more lines of data contained within them, to enable any of our consultants to be able to access detailed information about the booking in the event of your having a query, saving your having to wait for a designated consultant to become available.

We have also found it useful to provide new clients with a “map” of an invoice, with indicators explaining all the various information that can be found on the invoice. We have reproduced this on our website (click here, to see it).

You may not be aware that we are both an ATOL holder as well as an ATOL agent for other ATOL holders. This means you are financially protected under the CAA regulations and bonds, should either Medway Travel or our suppliers go out of business after we have taken payment from you for a booking for which you haven’t received the documents. For more information on ATOL’s please visit the CAA website www.caa.co.uk or follow this link ATOL's. We find that many clients confuse an ATOL receipt (which we have a statutory obligation to issue) with a receipt for payment. The former is actually an invoice, which may still be due for payment.

Finally we would like to remind all clients of our terms of business. We have to adhere to the very strict direct debiting regimes of the airlines and rail companies, which means we, as your agent, cannot agree payment terms beyond the dates set by the airlines. It is in order to assist our clients to hold to these terms, that we have introduced direct debiting and Airplus, as outlined above.

If you are interested in more details on any of the above, please call our Finance Manager Janellen on 01622 608254.

 

Emirates is revamping its in-flight service across all classes on its long haul fleet of Boeing 777s.

The Dubai-based carrier is introducing an enhanced version of its first class private suites, lie-flat massage seats in business class with more personal space, economy seats with extra legroom and large personal TV screens in all classes.

The new look will make its debut on new 777-300ER ULR (Ultra Long Range) aircraft being delivered this month as well as on 777-200LRs, the first of which will be delivered in August.

Emirates will receive 24 new aircraft fitted with the enhanced in-flight facilities over the next 18 months. The airline will also implement an "aggressive program" to retrofit its existing 777s.

The new 777-300ERs (ULR) will offer eight private suites in first class, 42 lie-flat seats in business, and 304 seats in economy. The 777-200LRs will have eight first class private suites, 42 lie-flat seats in business, and 216 seats in economy.

Airline president Tim Clark explained that their premium customers say they want more personal space, particularly on long-haul travel, and these considerations have been key in the development and refinement of the Emirates’ product.

The new cabins will become available on three daily flights from New York to Dubai and a new service from Houston starting in December.

Medway Travel has access to one of the largest portfolios of specially negotiated contract fares open to any travel agent in the country. This means we can - subject to availability at the time of booking - offer unusually low prices for many long-haul and certain European routes.

This month's examples are:

Economy Class Fares

Route	Airline	Fare	Taxes
New York	British Airways	£124.00	£162.40
Las Vegas via Detroit	Northwest Airlines	£227.00	£139.60
Dubai via Paris	Air France	£119.00	£175.90
Shangai via Frankfurt	Lufthansa	£275.00	£188.40
Beijing via Frankfurt	Lufthansa	£275.00	£188.40
Seoul via Dubai	Emirates	£324.00	£62.60
Hong Kong via Amterdam	KLM	£262.00	£158.60
Mumbai via Zurich	Swiss	£216.00	£151.30
Bangalore via Paris	Air France	£271.00	£174.60

Business Class Fares

Route	Airline	Fare	Taxes
New York	Silverjet	£756.00	£74.80
Las Vegas	Maxjet	£1078.00	£75.50
Dubai	Virgin Atlantic	£1173.00	£171.20
Shangai	China Eastern	£1199.00	£164.00
Beijing via Shangai	China Eastern	£1199.00	£164.00
Seoul	Asiana	£1620.00	£161.10
Hong Kong via Zurich	Swiss	£1180.00	£196.20
Mumbai via Zurich	Swiss	£1004.00	£191.30
Bangalore via Frankfurt	Lufthansa	£1248.00	£225.30

Each month we bring you a small selection of the 3 million such fares, to illustrate the level of fares you can enjoy as a result of our extensive connections and research.

So if your next destination isn't on the above list of examples, please do contact us. There is every chance we will have a real bargain to offer you!

Following a government rail review, Virgin Trains is to cease operating the Cross Country franchise from 11 November this year as the Department for Transport (DfT) has awarded the network to rival Arriva.

Virgin has operated the route for ten years, ever since the company’s launch in January 1997.

The franchise currently links some 115 towns and cities from Aberdeen to Penzance, Cardiff to Stansted and Manchester to Bournemouth, although the network is to change slightly with the addition of some services operating under Central Trains.

Arriva will run the franchise for eight years and four months and plans to introduce the following benefits:

• Increased evening services to/from Stansted by extending journeys from Birmingham to Cambridge
• Wi-fi access, which is free to first class passengers
• Web-based ticketing system from December 2009 allowing customers to reserve seats, print tickets and receive tickets via mobile phone
• 25% more luggage space from internal refits to Voyager trains
• Catering offered to passengers in their seats, including hot meals in first class on weekdays
• Refurbished coaches on Birmingham to Stansted and Cardiff to Nottingham trains, with first class seats on every service

Arriva is also to add an additional 40 carriages to the network, which in conjunction with current coach refurbishments will provide an extra 3,000 seats a day on the busiest routes.

However, while annual rises of regulated fares (such as season tickets) will, as with all franchises, be regulated by the government and are currently capped at RPI+1%, Arriva has stated it may raise unregulated fares (such as cheap day returns) by an average of 3.4% above inflation each year.

Medway Travel consultants have the very latest technology at their finger tips for researching rail fares, and we have found we normally can achieve average savings for corporate clients using rail, by identifying best fare opportunities (which the rail companies seem not too keen to promote!). So please remember to contact us with your rail requirements

Continental switches to North Terminal at Gatwick

 

Continental Airlines has transferred its six daily non-stop transatlantic services at London Gatwick Airport from the South Terminal to the North Terminal.

The move gives it a fully dedicated check-in area in the main concourse of the North Terminal, including self-service e-Service kiosks and support for customers who check-in online.

Its daily non-stop departures from Gatwick – three flights daily to its New York hub, Newark Liberty International Airport, two flights daily to Houston and a seasonal daily flight to Cleveland – will operate from adjacent gates for the first time.

Continental BusinessFirst customers and Presidents Club members now have access to the Emirates lounge at the North Terminal

Eos expands transatlantic frequency

 

All-business class airline Eos is increasing the flight frequency on its Stansted-New York route, to 40 flights a week.

The increase from 32 flights a week starts on September 9 when the airline's fourth Boeing 757 enters service.

The additional 48-seat aircraft will enable Eos to offer daytime flights from both London and New York. The carrier will also run the last available commercial flight from London to New York on Sundays with a 22.30 departure, arriving at JFK at 01.25 local time on Monday morning.

The airline claims that there will no longer any reason “to endure the Heathrow experience” just for the sake of having more schedule options.

Please do contact us before arranging your next trip across the North Atlantic. There are now so many alternatives to chose from, there are clear benefits in asking our consultants to identify the options which will best suit your convenience as well as your budget.

American Airlines to fly from Stansted

 

American Airlines has announced that it will launch daily services from London Stansted to New York's JFK from October 29, 2007. The new service will be operated by a two-class Boeing 767-300 aircraft with 221 seats including 30 new business class seats in a 2-2-2 configuration.
The Stansted departure opens up the possibility of passengers flying out of Stansted to JFK, while returning from that airport to Heathrow.

The airline believes that this was something corporate clients, particularly those based in the City of London and Docklands, would be welcome.

Stansted already has New York services in the form of business-class-only airlines Maxjet and Eos, but American will be the first to offer an economy product from the Essex airport to New York, and in addition, the new $1.3billion American Airlines terminal at JFK will allow passengers to connect directly onward with 200 destinations across America, on both American and American Eagle services.

A second daily service is scheduled for introduction at the end of March 2008, though timings for the second service have yet to be finalised. Prices for these flights will be available shortly.

BA voted least environmentally friendly brand

 

British Airways has been named the most 'unfriendly' brand, company or product when it comes to green issues.
In the online survey, carried out earlier this year and probed the views of 1,132 adults, three other airlines - American Airlines (second), Ryanair (third) and easyJet (fifth) – were in the top five most environmentally unfriendly brands.

Car manufacturer Range Rover came in at number four.

The top five most green friendly brands were The Body Shop, Ecover, WholeEarth, The Co-op and Tesco.

Medway Travel is planning to be able to advise clients on the carbon footprint of clients’ trips including flights, hotel accommodation and rail journeys, within the next 12 months. We should we believe, then be able to provide MI on this along with the MI on travel spend which we already supply to those clients who wish to have it.

If you are interested in this taking advantage of this additional service when it becomes available, please contact us.

 

If you or your colleagues have plans to visit any overseas trade fair in the future, please contact us as soon as possible about your arrangements for travel and accommodation, as the earlier we can make the bookings for you, the lower will be the cost of the airfares, and the greater the selection of hotel accommodation.

We would also suggest you take a look at our website Trade Fairs page from time to time, to help with your forward planning.

Algeria – Algiers – SIAC: (Food & Technology) 17th – 20th November 2007
Algeria – Algiers – PLASTICS: 3rd – 6th May, 2008

Australia – Sydney – HOSPIMEDICA: 13th – 15th May, 2008

Brazil – Sao Paulo – TUBOTECH: 2nd – 4th October, 2007

China – Shanghai – WORLD FOOD OF CHINA: 4th – 7th September 2007
China – Guangzhou – ALL IN GLASS: 21st – 24th November, 2007

Germany – Cologne – SPOGA: 2nd – 4th September 2007
Germany - Cologne – IAM: 7th – 9th September 2007
Germany – Cologne – Eu Vend: 13th – 15th September 2007
Germany – Dusseldorf – GDS (shoes): 14th – 16th September, 2007
Germany – Dusseldorf – BOOT: 19th – 27th January, 2008

India – Mumbai – WORLD OF FOOD: 19th – 21st November, 2007

Kurdistan – Erbil – ERBIL INTNL. FAIR: 29th October – 2nd November 2007

Russia – Moscow – CPM: 5th – 9th September, 2007
Russia – Moscow – INTERPLASTICA: 29th December, 2007 – Ist January, 2008

Saudi Arabia – Riyadh – SAUDIBUILD/STONE: 12th – 15th November, 2007

Singapore – ENVIROASIA: 27th – 30th November, 2007
Singapore – IDEM: 4th – 8th April, 2008


Switzerland – St. Gallen – NANOEUROPE: 11th – 13th September, 2007

Thailand – Bangkok – HOSPIMEDICA: 12th – 14th September, 2007
Thailand – Bangkok – Wire Tube SEAsia: 16th – 18th October 2007

Turkey – Istanbul - Packaging: 17th 21st October 2007

U.A.E. - Dubai – PLME: 23th – 25th October, 2007

Ukraine – Donetsk – METALLURGY UKRAINE: 4th – 7th September 2007
Ukraine – Kiev – Medica/Health: 16th – 19th October 2007

Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City – Environment Vietnam: 18th – 21st October 2007

Also, don't forget, if there are a number of you travelling together, there are major savings possible for groups of 9 or more, when we negotiate group rates with the airlines. Click here to see more about our Group travel services.

Many thanks to all those kind clients who took the trouble to give us valuable feed-back on their views of our service. It was much appreciated and is truly helpful in our continuing quest for ever higher quality ratings.

In our view, the standard of service quality can only be determined by the level of quality as perceived by clients.

We are delighted that again this June showed that the average score clients gave us in response to our asking well over 200 named individual users amongst our corporate clients to mark us out of 10 for 16 elements of our service (click here for details), was 9.1. The scale we asked responders to use, was 1 = unacceptable, 5 = good and 10= excellent, so the averaging across the board rating by our clients was over 80% of the way between good and excellent.

Whilst we take some pride in this, we are by no means complacent. Whilst 13 of the 16 elements taken individually had an average score of over 9, three were between 8 and 9. These were our a) forex service, our accounting – please see “xxxxxxxxx) in this issue) and the provision of the best travel solution for your trips on the first telephone call.

The forex service is out-sourced and we will look at that. The comments in the “free text” box suggested that a few clients did not fully understand the statutory requirements laid down by the CAA regarding the issue of ATOL receipts or that due to the payment terms laid down by the airlines, we have no choice but to raise invoices on issue of tickets, irrespective of the date of travel. And then, we are always looking to up-date our technology to enable our consultants to research every alternative quickly and efficiently, but there are still times when some additional research can pay dividends in identifying the very best fare for the trip.

On the other hand, we were delighted that the top scoring elements included Our Staff are knowledgeable and friendly with 96.4% they are friendly and cheerful 94.5% and our quotes are accurate at 93.6%.

Amongst the many appreciative comments responders added to their completed forms, was this from Karen Hobson of The Wolseley plc near Reading :

Medway are reliable, knowledgeable, friendly and efficient every time I have had to deal with them to book corporate travel.

If at any time you have any concerns or suggestions about our service, please do contact us right away. We value feed back of all sorts – even (perhaps especially) if it is about something we should have done better.

Our client concern reporting procedure records the details of every known concern, whether reported by the client, or thought by a member of our staff possibly to have caused concern.
We have been keeping careful track of these for over 5 years, and our latest moving five half -year total shows that there has been a concern of some description known to us (sometimes resolved by us without the client realising it was an error, corrected in the nick of time) on only 3.7 per one thousand bookings, due to a Medway Travel fault. This compares with our first half 2007 figure of 3.6 per thousand. In addition to this, concerns reported by clients about travel vendors they have used for a trip amount to 4.8 per thousand. Thus in the last half year, less than 1% of trips we have organised have been the subject of any sort of service quality concern. Our next target is to get this down below 0.5%!

We are delighted to announce the prize draw winner associated with the above quality survey, is Tako Seifert of Hochiki Europe – Congratulations! Tako wins a Medway Travel holiday voucher to the value of £100 .

UK business travellers have been urged to make more use of rail travel as research indicates the train is the best transport mode for optimum productivity.

A joint research project, conducted by the University of the West of England, Bristol and Lancaster University, challenges the perceptions of business travellers who opt for the 'fastest' mode of travel, viewing travel time as unproductive time.

The poll for Network Rail found that 86% of rail business travellers have work that could easily be undertaken on the train, and of those who work or study on the train, 96% feel their travel time is worthwhile.

Enhanced on-board working environments have been achieved through portable technologies and Wi-Fi.

The research found that 20% of rail passengers carry a laptop with them while travelling, which is in line with an expected average annual growth rate of 15% over the next five years. This rapid growth highlights demand for mobile connectivity and productivity tools for 'working on the move'.

While the impetus is on employers being urged to review short-haul flights and car usage for business travel because of the environmental impact, it is also important for businesses to know that careful business transport choice can maximise their employees productivity and minimise the economic cost of business travel, according to Network Rail.

Business people are increasingly choosing rail as the most productive way of travelling. Unlike travel by air or car, the train allows them to use their computer, mobile phone or PDAs while on the move – or even use their journey to have a meeting. Travel by train offers an ideal environment for productive thinking and planning time, catching up on emails and perhaps a better quality working environment than the office.

Professor Glenn Lyons, who led the research, said: "The challenge is now about employers and employees ensuring the best mode of travel is chosen to facilitate the best use of their travel time. It is no longer just about the quickest, cheapest or most convenient option but about the one which also provides the best environment for productivity."

Please do contact our consultants. They will be pleased to quote you the cost and journey times for rail as an option to consider against your habitual mode of travel. It is also said to be more environmentally friendly!

If you don't already possess a biometric passport (and according to the Home Office around four million of us do), then it will certainly be the only option when your current passport expires in the next few years. By then, ID cards with similar chips may perhaps have been introduced. Like it or not, it seems that biometrics will infiltrate our everyday lives and our facial measurements and fingerprints will become as indispensable as a password or house key.

Since October 2006 all new passports produced in the UK contain a biometric chip, designed to link incontrovertibly the holder to the passport, and therefore perform two essential roles – firstly confirming the identity of the individual, and secondly detecting counterfeit or manipulated documents.

At first glance there is little difference between a biometric e-passport and the machine-readable EU passports that have been in circulation in the UK since the late 1990s, except for a small symbol at the bottom of the front page. This symbol signifies that biometric information is held on an embedded microchip, which is effectively a digitally encoded "map" of the holder's facial measurements (distance between eyes, nose, mouth, ears, etc) taken from the holder's photograph. Incidentally, this explains the requirement for a clear passport photograph of your unsmiling face to be provided with your application. The biometric image, along with the personal details of the holder found on page 31 of his or her passport, is then added to the microchip, which can be scanned by a reader at security checkpoints to confirm the identity of the holder.

Inevitably there have been concerns regarding the introduction of these e-passports, including claims that they can be cloned with the biometric information from a passport, so that it could be used on a fake one. There's no doubting that there is technology out there that makes this possible, but the government's response is that even if the biometric information can be copied, it can't actually be altered. This leaves someone looking to travel under a cloned biometric passport, with first having to copy the information from the original (requiring them to be in very close contact with it), and then changing their appearance to look enough like the digital photograph so that trained security staff wouldn't notice the difference. Not impossible, but equally not that likely.

Apart from the remote possibility of the new passports being misused – a person with a stolen passport would have to disguise themselves very effectively to look just like the person whose passport they were trying to use - detractors should also be aware that at present there is no more information held on the chip than there is printed on the penultimate page of the passport (and via the machine-readable strip). There is talk of fingerprints and iris scans being added to the biometric chip in the future, although this still seems to be some way off in the UK.

More worrying for regular business travellers though, is the uncertainty of how long these biometric chips will actually last under the strain of frequent opening, closing, stamping and scanning. The National Audit Office has recently reported that the chips have just a two-year warranty, a fifth of the lifetime of a regular passport, and only time will tell if travellers will be left stranded at security checkpoints with faulty passports.

The summer FFP promotions are here, with both AA and Virgin offering incentives to travel over the holiday period. AA is offering triple miles for premium passengers on its London-New York route, while Virgin has halved the miles required for economy redemptions on many of its routes.

AAdvantage members can earn triple miles when travelling in business or first class between London and New York before August 31. The carrier says passengers can earn over 22,000 miles for just one return trip, enough for a free flight within Europe. The bonus miles are on offer to any member booking flights in classes F, J, A, D (originating from either London or New York), providing they are pre-registered, quoting promotion code AALHR.

Meanwhile Virgin Flying Club members can redeem flights on several routes for half the normal miles until the end of this month. Examples include London – New York (JFK and Newark), for which redemption requirements are down from 45,000 miles to 22,500, London – Mumbai (reduced from 50,000 to 25,000 miles), and London – Shanghai (30,000 instead of the normal 60,000).

It goes almost without saying that these terms are a great deal more favourable than the largest British Airline (what’s their name…..?) offers!

Rail passengers who travel through major European hubs could soon have less expensive and more seamless trips, thanks to a new alliance of high-speed rail operators. Railteam, an alliance of a number of European rail companies including Eurostar UK, unveiled this week its new network, which aims to compete with airlines for international travellers.

Beginning in early 2009, travellers will be able to book rail tickets to destinations in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria, with a single transaction. With all tickets and prices listed, Railteam officials expect fares to drop as a result.

To facilitate this new booking system, Railteam is investing 30 million Euros in connecting the separate distribution systems, and will guarantee to offer the cheapest fare between any two stations in the network.

At the five main European hubs of Lille, Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, Railteam will hire multilingual staff to work onboard trains and in stations. Under a plan called 'Hop on the Next Train', the network will allow passengers to board the next available train if they are delayed because of late service, even if they have bought a non-flexible ticket. And similar to frequent flyer miles, frequent rail travellers will eventually be able to accumulate "train miles" anywhere on the network to get discounts on future trips.

Departure and arrival schedules will also be adjusted so passengers will not have to wait more than 15 minutes between trains. Railteam said research shows business travellers will travel up to four hours on rail "because of the increased productivity versus the airlines".

The individual alliance partners will field complaints about each other's service, which means travellers will no longer have to contact operators in foreign countries.

Railteam expects 25 million international travellers will be using their European high-speed rail network by 2010, and the number of rail passengers to triple by 2020, and Medway Travel looks forward to helping you to take advantage of this new rail network, when the time comes.