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Growth of expo suggests suits are on the move

THE LOCAL BUSINESS community is showing renewed interest in travel, evidenced by the 20 per cent rise in registration for the Business Travel Expo planned for March 22-23 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Organiser Centaur Exhibitions reported that more than 1,000 company representatives had registered for the series of educational seminars on business travel, compared with last year's attendance of about 600.

'It indicates there is a real thirst for knowledge in business travel,' Centaur's group event director Paul Robin said.

Now in its fourth year, the expo groups together airlines, hotel groups, travel management companies, credit card companies, reservation systems, tourism authorities and other transport companies as exhibitors.

Some exhibitors will speak in the seminars on topics related to the basic principles of effectively managing business travel.

The expo was hit when international business and travel were stymied by the terrorist attacks in 2001, Sars in 2003 and the war in Iraq last year.

'The market conditions have stood still for the past few years. Now the market is increasingly positive and business travel has gone up. Businesses are doing better and it's time for businesses to start looking at how they get their executives on the road again,' Mr Robin said.

Surveys of visitors in previous fairs indicated that nearly half of them were from small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with annual travel budgets not exceeding $500,000.

Mr Robin said SMEs would continue to be the biggest group of visitors to the expo, similar to the trends for the same shows held in four other countries.

'There is still a big thirst of knowledge from SMEs. They don't prioritise [travel] until they see the need, for example when their travel budget is getting out of control,' he said.

Travel managers of bigger corporations will gather at a different event, the Congress of Senior Travel Managers, where more advanced issues on travel management will be discussed.

The congress is held on the first day of the expo and is expected to be attended by 30 to 40 travel managers from the Hong Kong offshoots of multinationals such as IBM, Manulife and Morgan Stanley. Twenty travel managers from big corporations in India have also formed a delegation to attend the congress.

While the show is being promoted regionally and visitors from 23 countries have attended previous shows, Hong Kong visitors still make up 80 to 90 per cent of the mix.

The organisers are harnessing efforts to entice visitors from the Pearl River Delta by offering visitors upgrades in the Guangzhou to Hong Kong train service through one of the sponsors, Kowloon and Canton Railway Corp.

It also wants to develop the show regionally with plans to host buyer programmes for future expos.

'We have proved to people that we are here for the long term,' Mr Robin said.

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