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MARCH/APRIL 2013


Working relationships


Buying Business Travel brings together TMCs and their travel-buyer clients from a wide range of sectors to find out just what makes their relationships tick


SNOW BUSINESS


Bob Papworth hears how travel management company HRG pulled out the stops to aid its clients during January’s big freeze


44


FOR THE 15-YEAR-OLD Papworth twins, the morning of January 18, 2013, was an occasion of almost- unalloyed joy. School was cancelled, mock GCSEs had been postponed, and the garden was ankle-deep in stuff just begging to be thrown at the slip-sliding passers-by. Inevitably, they had to endure the curmudgeonly paternal exhortations to keep the noise down because “these Buying Business Travel features don’t write themselves, you know” – but, leaving aside me and my aversion to anything cold and wet that doesn’t


contain vodka, this promised to turn into the best Friday ever. Of course, being a mere 15, and yet to inherit their father’s deeply- ingrained disillusionment with life in general and adverse weather conditions in particular, they considered not for one moment the plight of those who were, on that same morning, thinking unkind thoughts about a transport system that grinds to halt every time it clouds over a bit.


And they (the unkind thought- thinkers, that is) were legion. More


than 800 flights out of Heathrow had to be cancelled that weekend and, at various times, Cardiff, Bristol, Southampton, Birmingham and London City were shut down. Southern and South West Trains revised their timetables, and Greater Anglia and Eurostar, among others, also cancelled services. A section of the M4 in Wales was completely closed for a while, and many A-roads were rendered impassable. For professional services and


accountancy firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC), with some 7,500


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