February 27, 2008

Logistic chaos

I'm in Bangkok now attending a series of regional meetings. It started last Friday with a small group of senior medical professionals with whom our regional marketing team consults on a regular basis to seek their inputs pertaining to our clinical development programs, marketing strategies or simply to update them on new data or studies we have. Following that, it was a speaker training program for a larger group of medical professionals across the Asia Pacific region. Our own internal regional marketing meeting started on Sunday and will wrap up by tomorrow lunch time.

An event agency was engaged to run the speaker training program but as their charges are quite exorbitant, the regional marketing team decided not to engage them to organise our internal meetings. And that's when arranging the logistics for this series of meetings became a nightmare! Email started coming in several weeks ago requesting for names, check-in date to the hotels and flight details of attendees of the different meetings. Unfortunately, as different people were organising different events, things became chaotic especially for people like me who attends all the meetings running consecutively. I wasn't sure whom I should write to for hotel reservations as there wasn't a central liaison person.

Things turned out well eventually but on hindsight, I could probably have avoided the entire headache if I've just followed my heart and book the hotels online through Hotel Reservations. Not only do they have a variety of offerings in accommodation choices such as hotels, motels, resorts and vacation rentals, their rates are competitive. They also offer great discounts and special promotions at various world wide destinations.

With Hotel Reservations, all I need to do is choose the dates and city, and it will compare across several providers and present me with the best available rates on the specified date. I can view photos of how the hotels look like and plot them on a map so I can choose the most appropriate hotel based on location and price.

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