Face-to-Face is Still Key

A recap of the 2010 RADIUS Global Meeting from Bill Tech

A team from Travel and Transport recently attended the 2010 RADIUS Global Meeting. Held in Hong Kong, this year's event brought together over 40 travel management companies, as well as hotels, airlines, and GDS executives from around the world.

After giving our attendees a little time to recover from their journey to the other side of the world, I talked to Bill Tech, Travel and Transport's President and CEO, and RADIUS' Chairman of the Board, about the meeting.

"RADIUS is growing and maturing as an organization," said Bill as we visited in his office. Much like Travel and Transport, RADIUS is financially solid organization. They are profitable, they have no debt, and have cash in the bank.

We discussed RADIUS' recent announcement of new additions and realignment of its executive leadership in order to direct focus on the company's regional member agencies, corporate clients and global suppliers (see RADIUS press releases here and here). Bill added, "The additions of these high-level, experienced travel executives will have a significant impact on RADIUS' success, and I'm very encouraged by their thoughts and ideas."

Our discussion then moved to the event itself. Bill was very impressed by speaker Shaun Rein, Director of China Market Research Group. Rein, who was born and raised in China with a Harvard MBA, spoke about the changing economy in China as well as myths vs. facts about doing business in China. "We have many customers who operate in China so Shaun's viewpoint of the global marketplace was very insightful," said Bill.

As I talked with Bill, I could sense an overall theme developing in what he was telling me. It seems that, despite the innovative new technologies out there for remote meetings, web-conferencing, language translation, etc., face-to-face meetings are still very relevant and necessary - particularly in international business.

"The meeting was a wonderful opportunity to network with the many RADIUS agencies from around the world," said Bill. "We were able to discuss important RADIUS issues, as well as challenges that travel management companies face throughout the world. It also gave us an extraordinary opportunity to visit face-to-face with our RADIUS partners about service requirements that are in place for all of our clients."

Travel and Transport, of course, communicates constantly with our fellow RADIUS agencies as we manage our customers' multinational travel programs. But there is something about being able to see a person face-to-face and understand the context and tone in which they are speaking that cannot quite be duplicated by technology - at least not yet.

"Translation is not as easy as you might think", said Bill, as he told me about one of the speakers at the event. Nury Vittachi, a blogger and a journalist with the South Morning China Post," recounted stories about how the travel business has dramatically changed in China in recent years, and provided a look into the future travel landscape.

One topic discussed by Vittachi dealt with translation issues and comical examples of common Chinese sayings translated into English. As Bill described this to me, it made me think about an article I had read about Google, and their imminent plans to combine their mobile video technology with their voice recognition and translation products to create a mobile Star Trek-esque "Universal Translator".  It sounds fantastic in theory, but with people's tendencies toward local and regional colloquialisms, will it really be practical and useful for global business? It's worth thinking about.