Editors are worry warts. The photo accompanying this month’s CitySourcing profile proved it once again: could that possibly be the infamous I-35 bridge that collapsed in August 2007? It’s not. It’s the Central Avenue Bridge, which also crosses the Mississippi River. Minnesota’s Twin Cities, it turns out, is a treasure trove of bridges: extending railroad tracks, streets, highways and pedestrian walkways. One, the Guthrie Theater’s Endless Bridge, goes nowhere. The 175-foot cantilevered structure, actually an architectural element that extends from the theatre’s lobby, ends in an observation deck.
Even at that, the Endless Bridge is not the most remarkable in Minneapolis. That accolade, by most accounts, goes to the St. Anthony Falls Bridge, which replaced the I-35. Among its claims to fame:
• Although the bridge already carries the 10 lanes of I-35 traffic, it is also designed to host light rail and bus rapid transit in the future. The original bridge was designed for four lines, and later expanded to eight by paving the shoulders.
• It’s designed to last for 100 years, but this time no one is taking any chances. The bridge is equipped with 323 sensors that regularly measure bridge conditions — deck movement, stress, temperature, etc. — for later analysis.
• In a DOE-sponsored pilot test, the bridge is illuminated with light-emitting diodes (LED) to reduce maintenance costs.
• Most remarkable, the new bridge came in ahead of time and under budget
But if bridges aren’t your thing and you want to know more about the airport that serves the Twin Cities, refer to the Airport Monitor department in our January issue.
CWT’s Recipe For Blended Transient & Meeting Hotel Spend
If you’re hoping to combine transient and meeting needs into your 2011 hotel program negotiations, now’s the time to start collecting the pertinent data, reminds Carlson Wagonlit Travel in their Quarter 1 issue of CWT Vision.
Will it be worth it? You can do the math if you know what your company’s T&E spend is. Meeting spend is usually somewhere between 25 percent and 35 percent of that, says CWT, and hotel spend for meetings averages about 37 percent of total meeting spend. Add the total hotel spend for meetings to the total hotel transient spend and imagine your hoteliers’ reactions.
That total is an estimate, of course. It may convince you and your bosses that collecting the real data will be worth the effort, but next fall, your hoteliers will prefer to see the actual numbers. So start collecting now.
Where do you look? “Travel buyers can use transient data to identify potential meeting spend by looking for spikes in certain cities or hotel properties,” suggests CWT. “This may indicate a meeting has taken place.” Other sources of information:
• Surveys and interviews with meeting planners,
• Finance staff.
• Accounts payable information, like the general ledger or meeting card data.
If you’re not too sure of your data that first year, work with only a small number of cities to compile a list of hotels or chains that will receive you RFP for both transient and meetings. “A travel buyer may choose to solicit all hotels for transient and meetings purposes or, based on hotel capabilities, travel buyers may have a list of hotels that will be selected to provide bids for transient-only, meetings-only, or both,” says CWT. “There is not a right or wrong way.”
Open Skies: Not Always An Open Book
It’s easy to assume that the concept of Open Skies is a strictly US phenomenon but that’s not true. Nor is it true that these agreements are so tightly defined that once an agreement is signed, an air travel market is completely liberalized and no further changes will be made. See this month’s cover story on the current US-Japan Open Skies agreement for some insight on that.
To illustrate point number one, consider that while most attention in the US commercial aviation community has been focused on the agreement between the US and Japan, members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been working on their own pact.
There are two immediate lessons here. First, this is not a uniquely-US concern. For instance, Singapore has reached Open Skies Agreements with more than 30 countries, including the US, United Arab Emirates, Australia and the UK, in addition to 17 members of the EU.
Second, not all such agreements are bilateral. The ASEAN Opens Skies agreement is quintessentially multi-lateral — the organization has 10 members: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
At the same time, new changes are being envisioned between Europe and the United States.
What? You thought that was all over?
The truth is that even between two countries, the issues that can be addressed are so numerous and so inter-related with other parts their national economies that there is more that can be worked out in a single treaty. The first question is whether the agreement concerns use of a nation’s air space by military or commercial aviation. Beyond that, virtually any detail is open for consideration:
• Where, when and how often a carrier from the other country or countries may land, disembark and board passengers, and then take off.
• What airport facilities will be open to the carriers and their passengers.
• What fees will be charged.
• Safety and security standards.
• Provision of ground-handling services.
• And finally, the timing for setting all the negotiated details into motion.
From most participants’ viewpoints, the struggle is worthwhile. Last year, after an agreement was stuck between Singapore and Malaysia, frequency between the two capitals increased by more than 70 percent. And in the decade after protectionist regulations were stricken in Europe in 1997, 44 million more people took to the skies. Lower fares from increased competition appear to have been achieved as well; more than one-fifth of those new travelers were on low-cost carriers.
As for those details that ultimately are not subject to mutual agreement: the new round of talks between the US and EU prove that there’s always next time.
The Last Word
The world’s most successful failure at stealing credit card data has gone to jail, caught and convicted of stealing card data and other personal information from a variety of data repositories along the online retailing chain. The value has been placed at $200 million; the economic damage, in the billions. According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, which is jointly run by the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, identify theft is slightly more than 14 percent of all cyber crimes reported. Credit card fraud is another 10 percent. Even so, they weren’t the most frequently-reported categories of cyber fraud. That distinction goes to the category labeled “fraudulent use of the FBI’s name.”
