Inside Out | For all of Apec’s talk of lowering trade barriers, its single biggest success is removing visas for business travellers in the group
- Business travel accounted for a quarter of international journeys in 2017, valued at around US$1.33 billion
- As a regular traveller of between 15 and 20 trips across Apec every year, I calculated that the savings from visa and processing fees amounted to US$1,000 with the use of the Apec Business Travel Card
Of all the plastic cards in my wallet, perhaps my most treasured is the Apec Business Travel Card (ABTC). It’s a close run between that, and my green Octopus card for senior residents.
The ABTC is precious not just for the time and money saved in getting visas, but for the guilty pleasure it gives at that unfriendliest of points in every international journey – the immigration queue – when I slip across into the diplomatic line.
Arriving in Atlanta last week, it saved me at least an hour of listless waiting at the end of a long and exhausting flight from Seoul. I could almost feel the gnashing of teeth behind me.
The only point in the past 15 years that using the ABTC had backfired me was arriving in Auckland in New Zealand, where for quaintly politically correct reasons, cardholders had to join the queue reserved for diplomats, aircrew and families with children.
For the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum, now almost 30 years old, the travel card is still the single most tangible evidence of the group’s success. No matter how much Apec talks about reducing barriers to trade, both at and behind borders, this is the achievement business travellers seem to treasure the most.
