Best Kept Secrets    -    Business Travel - A special Advertising Report
 

"THERE is in this [named Asian] destination a waterfront restaurant away from the tourist area. Local businesspeople eat there. The seafood is superb. You can eat as much as you like and walk away with change from $15, including the price of drinks.''

The speaker is much-travelled Sydney medical and dental supply importer, Mr Greg Wisbey, who is a-building probably the world's best Website for business travellers. It offers details of hundreds of places like the restaurant he's talking about.

Much of the site is open already but to this stage, it's perhaps the least-known major business travel asset in the world.

Like many before him, Greg Wisbey has long found that the Web offers lots of useful material, but it's very poorly organised. The information you need might not be online at all, and you can waste considerable time while learning that.

Mr Wisbey's discontent came to a head in year 2000 after a travel agency booked him into an unknown hotel in Cologne, a city he was to visit for an international trade show. Keying in the name of his hotel on the Internet gave him a picture of its front door, a picture of a wine glass, and a picture of a knife and fork -- which offered little guidance to its practical value.

As it turned out, the hotel was excellent, and located only three tram stops from the Cologne exhibition centre. This centre attracts more than one million business travellers a year, and Greg Wisbey's mind started to turn on meeting the information needs of those million travellers, and the many, many millions more who must visit cities they don't know much about, to do business.

What the Sydney man has done with a small technical team, www.thebtr.com, opened its electronic doors in January this year and at present rates, will receive its quarter-millionth visitor in November, or perhaps later this month. There's nothing else quite like it on the Web. "Feedback from our visitors tell us what they want to know,'' says Mr Wisbey. "They want to know about local courier services, about how to find a reliable interpreter. They want to know local geographic, economic and political information". "They want to know how to get a visa. They want to know about any health alerts. They want to know about possible government restrictions on trade and business".

"They want to know what to wear -- how's the weather at the time of their planned visit.'' And much more. "Go to most nations on our Website,'' Mr Wisbey says, "and you find a picture of the kind of electrical plugs used there. There's a colour guide to the different denominations of the local currency, and telephone dialling codes show how to call within the nations, and out of the country.'' Answers to all visitors' questions are free.

The Website is funded by paid admission of hotels, restaurants and nightclubs in the city listings. But thebtr.com is much more than an accommodation guide. When the site is fully populated, it will offer guidance to 1600 cities. Several hundred major business travel destinations appear already, covering all inhabited continents and several island nations.

The quality of thebtr.com's information shows in the fact that the Internet browser company Netscape and others list it as a superior site for business travellers. The spread of its information shows in the fact that the Belarus government Website advises visitors to turn to thebtr.com as the best source of information on... Belarus, a republic sited between Lithuania and Ukraine. Advice can be as specific as the information that women who arrive in Bahrain unaccompanied by a man, may be shipped right out again with no entry to the nation: best to check beforehand with consular or embassy officials.

"My single most surprising discovery in establishing our site was discovering that there was nothing like it already,'' Mr Wisbey says. "After my disappointing Web search for information about Cologne, I looked for business traveller information for Germany: nothing collected. Then for the United States. Again, no central information database.''

The database at the heart of thebtr.com is built with an extensive set of links. The US Central Intelligence Agency's World Fact Book supplies much information nation-by-nation. A street map is supplied for each city on the site. Local meteorological bureaux offer climate and weather information. Health alerts? These come from the US Centre for Disease Control and the British and Commonwealth advisory service. World times, currency exchange rates, all are at the business traveller's fingertips through the btr linked services.

"If we'd known how much work was involved, we might not have started this development two years ago,'' Mr Wisbey says. "But with our architecture in place, it's just a matter of continuing the collation we started in 2000". "We've learned how to confirm that service providers are of good repute by checking them with travellers and local expat residents. We limit our hotel, restaurant and nightclub listings to no more than six in each city, and we receive no commissions for bookings.''

Major international hotel chains are listed for many destinations. Unlike many other travel sites, the btr.com doesn't require any form of registration, and demands no personal information from visitors. And as a reward for reading this far, learn that the waterfront restaurant mentioned in our opening paragraph is about to be listed at thebtr.com. It's in Phuket. Sigh. There may go the neighbourhood.

Controlled Flight
Organising your own business travel schedule has become much easier with the advent of specialist online booking sites. By. Perrie Croshaw

www.thebtr.com - The Business Travel Report

Got a question about the country you are due to visit or work in ?  The Business Travel Report , an independent company, provides detailed and factual answers for the business traveller about cities and countries throughout the world.

"I travel frequently" says BTR managing director Greg Wisbey, "But I was always frustrated by the lack of one cohesive report which would provide me with as much information as possible for me, the business traveller".

So Wisbey built this site for himself and the many thousands of other frustrated business travellers.

Information here answers questions to do with travel warnings, world times and exchange rates, geographical and demographic statistics on the relevant country as well as places to stay and eat.

"One feature of our report is that we recommend restaurants ad nightclubs that the local residents and expatriate community patronise. This eliminates the eternal question, ' Where can I entertain my guests ? ' ", Wisbey says.

Click on "Travel Warnings" and you go straight to the travel warnings pages at the websites for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, The US Department of State, The UK Foreign Office or Canada's Consular Affairs Bureau.

For health warnings, click on "SARS" and go straight to the World Health Organisation or the US Centre for Disease Control.

Travelling to Thailand ?  Click on "Asia" on the world map, then Thailand, then one of the 15 cities to find city maps, lists of hotels, restaurants, night clubs, car rentals, useful information (such as a diagram of the power points used there), plus useful links to banks, airlines, buses, trains and government departments.

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