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As your business grows and expands into new markets, you may find yourself having to coordinate business travel overseas. Doing so requires project management expertise, and an appropriate mindset. Business travel can be more than just running a conference in a different city or convention centre.
Organizing an overseas trip, using an international hotel requires planning, and project management. You need the list of all attendees, first and foremost. Then, you need to ascertain their needs for a hotel – do they need special accommodations (wheelchair or walker access, or a chair to sleep in, rather than a bed?). What other amenities will they need, for example access to a drug store to refill prescriptions, or vegetarian restaurants?
Once you’ve got your attendee list, the next thing to do is look at times. Like all good project management techniques, an international hotel stay benefits from a backwards "final objective to initial conditions" thought process. What is the event your group is going to? When does it end? When do your attendees come back, and when do they have to have recovered from their jet lag and be back in the office? Start from that date, and work backwards. You’ll need to allocate a day after the trip for your travelers to recover and catch up from jet lag and sleep deprivation, and you may want to allocate two if they’re older than 40.
So, having determined when your personnel have to come back, look at the event they’re going to, and make sure to block out an extra day on either end for travel, and an extra day or two before the event for recovery from jet lag. This tells you the earliest your people can arrive at the event you’re scheduling for. Project management makes organizing travel and international hotel stays much simpler.
Once you’ve got the dates set down, it’s time to start comparison shopping for international hotel rates. Again, a project management mindset can help – while the conference your people are attending may have a "block room rate", that may not be the best choice of hotel. You need to carefully weigh a number of factors.
First, will your attendees be able to drive to the conference? If they can, and are willing to do so, they may be able to cut the hotel rates in half by driving to and from the convention. Second, hotels adjacent to, or within walking distance of the convention center may be cheaper (or not!) than the local booking rate. As any project manager knows, comparison-shopping is essential, and time and money trade-offs are always worth putting some skull sweat into.
Once you’ve gotten the hotel selected, it’s time to look for accommodations, and for attractions in the area. Depending on the size and frequency of international conferences your business sends attendees to, it may be appropriate to extend the trip (or offer your employees the option of extending the trip) to go see local attractions or events. If your international travel is taking you to places with lots of entertainment options, this becomes a lot easier, and advanced booking as part of a hotel package or lodgings package can make the international trip a valuable perk for your employees, and save some money.
Other factors for running a business trip through an international hotel that are important to a project manager include factoring in currency exchange rates. Currency exchange rates are cyclical in nature, with influences from international events. If you regularly send people overseas, it may be worth it to throw funds into a bank in the country you’re using, in an interest bearing account, to let compound interest work to overcome the currency exchange transaction fees, or variability in the exchange rates. This is especially worthwhile if the currency exchange rate favors your native currency. As always, project management style thinking pays off here. Talk to your currency or customs broker for advice, and consider this one carefully.
If your employees are going to be overseas for an extended period of time, there’s also a novel trick you can do: Buy them mass transit passes (such as a Eurorail pass) rather than pay for auto rentals. They’ll have more freedom of movement, and save your company money as well. If this isn’t feasible, but the stay is going to be for a month or more (and they are legal to drive for extended periods of time), consider buying a used car for them to use for their trip, or buying out a lease on a leased vehicle. In addition to not having to worry about rental car fees and surcharges, if they’re going to be doing a lot of driving, it may be cheaper in the long run, especially in India or Asia, where car rentals are geared for sale primarily to foreign visitors, rather than locals, and are priced (and gouge) accordingly.
Lastly, you should look into passport issues, and make sure your employees are up on local customs, especially if they’re traveling to places like Asia, or India. Even cultural differences as small as the ones between America and Western Europe can be worth a briefing, and it gets even more important when going to Asia or Africa or the Middle East. For example, tipping is not done in Japan, and to do so is considered rude. In Egypt or Turkey, everyone expects a tip, without asking, for any kind of personal service, and not offering will result in you being seen as rude. Knowing when and how to offer cash for advice is an important social skill in Eastern Europe, while trying to do so in France or the Netherlands can be seen as insulting, or even criminal! All of these are factors that should influence your planning for projects involving international hotels and travel accommodations. Enjoy your trip, and make sure you plan to make it easier to take!
Look here for More project management training articles or for an extensive directory on related sites on: project management training.
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