As you know we have just spent a couple of days at the Business Travel Show as well as the Travel Technology Show, at Earls Court in London UK.

The two main reasons for our presence where:
1) The launch of our service in UK, France and Germany.
2) Talking to new potential clients on the UK market, and keep up to speed with our growth in Europe.

It surely has been intense, with loads of scheduled meetings, spiced with a bunch of spontaneous ones. Damn it´s fun to be out there talking to clients and partners, both existing as potential new ones. It always reminds me that it is people that are doing business, not companies.

We have met so many different people from Business Travel Agencies and Travel Management Companies, tech-companies, content providers, journalists and publishers. My first reflection is that they all have a couple of things in common, no matter if they are a small, mid-sized or large company:
- They are all highly skilled and professional, interested and keen to listen to a small and very niched entrepreneurial company like us
- They are all very focused on the difficult challenges in the aftermath of the world economic collapse
- They are all very polite and very friendly

My second reflection, which I found very interesting in our dialogs with all the different TMC´s is that almost all of them had different ideas of how to package, market and sell a service like ours. It struck me, that their own thoughts of what the best way of offering our service to their clients aligned with the way they differentiate themselves on the market. Some wants to charge per trip, some per month. Some wants to debit on the mobile phone bill and others wants to include it into a service portfolio or give it away. Or a combination of them all. Fortunately our service can handle such a customization no matter which way they choose.

So, from all the very interesting dialogs we´ve had during these days we definately have reason to believe that 2009 can be a very interesting and exciting year for Traveas in the UK market.

I also had the chance to sit down and have a cup of coffee with an old acquainted of mine, Mr Stephan Ekbergh, the founder of Travelstart.

Naturally I have talked with Stephan a couple of times during the autumn, but I haven´t met him since 2001 when I worked for MTV Networks and he still lived in the south of Sweden with an ambition for Travelstart to really “take off”. I must admit that I am nothing but extremely impressed by his achievements since then. Of course it takes a visionary entrepreneurship to get there, but I´m also convinced it has a lot to do with a true never give up mentality combined with sweaty hard work.

Travelstart is now one of the most successful travel agencies with a Swedish origin. Besides the Nordic countries they now operate in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, USA, Brazil and finally South Africa (which also is Stephans home since many years).

The Travelstart story, as well as Stephan himself, inspires me a lot and it was really nice to meet him again. If you want to be inspired yourself Stephan writes a very interesting blog (even if you´re not in the travel business) that I really recommend to all of you with entrepreneur dreams.

Enjoy!