British-born Martin Nicholls is chief executive of the Hong Kong arm of Talent2, a leading Australian-based executive search company. We spoke to him straight off the plane from Taipei, where the company recently established an office.
Mr Nicholls travels about once every two weeks on company business - in the region and to Talent2's Sydney headquarters - and in Asia with his family on as many short weekend breaks as possible.
'We tend to use Cathay Pacific and Qantas quite a lot, but we're not fixed to one particular airline, or to hotels. We all have our own preferences. We have a corporate travel policy with cost guidelines and we have agreements with various airlines and hotels, but we don't dictate particular choices,' Mr Nicholls said.
A seasoned business traveller, with more than 20 years of executive recruitment and human resource consulting experience gained in Europe and Australasia, Mr Nicholls heads a relatively new branch of the company and said, because Talent2 was reinvesting profits in the business, he travelled economy on short hauls 'unless there's a reason not to'.
One such reason, he said, might be the need to deliver a presentation the morning after an overnight flight. Long haul travel was generally in business class.
'The most important thing to me is that I get to where I'm going at the time I want to get there, and that I leave at the time I want to leave,' he said.
