April 2009
Global survey 'checks out' hotels'

Ask any regular traveller and you can almost guarantee they will have a hotel-from-hell story and (hopefully) a hotel-from-heaven counterpart. Whether you are travelling for pleasure or business, the place where you park your head at night can make or break the experience. So what matters? Does a hotel need a spa? Toiletries (to take!)? The latest technology? A green policy? How do people decide where they will lay their heads? Synovate asked over 6,300 people across 10 countries to find out.

November 2008
Men: Beauty or brawn, or both?

What makes a good-looking man? Is he clean-shaven, confident, and sexy? (Sounds like a good start!) Where is he more likely to come from? Are men using beauty-enhancing products or leaving their looks to nature? And do men and women see eye-to-eye on male beauty? Synovate took a long, lingering look at male beauty in 12 markets across the world, speaking with nearly 10,000 people about beautiful blokes and what makes them that way. In our analysis, we discovered cultural differences as well as some surprises (do two-thirds of French men really believe they are not sexy?).

September 2008
The ups and downs of air travel

Put 300 plus people in a really small space for a number of hours; expect many of them to sleep upright; feed them en masse (or not at all if it's budget); subject them to each other's snores, coughs, laughter, slurps and worse – and you're going to have a hard time keeping everyone happy. Sounds quite tough when you put it like that. Indeed, airlines face a considerable customer service challenge...keeping us all happy in the skies. Some of them rise to the challenge and some fail. Sometimes the difference can be a smile, sometimes it needs a lot more than that to create loyalty. Airlines with strong brands are invariably forgiven more, but do passengers even care about branding when all they want to do is get from A to B?

June 2008
Global survey: What would you do to be beautiful?

Beautiful things give us great pleasure. Art, music, landscapes... it goes without saying. But where do we stand on beautiful people? It's a tougher proposition because, frankly, we're not all 'Brangelina' or Aishwarya Rai. Of course many of us would say people are beautiful within. Synovate tackled a range of beauty issues in a global survey... how do people define beauty? Where do people from different cultures see themselves on the beauty scale? And would they want to do anything to change their looks? Over 7,000 people in nine markets across the world spilled their beauty secrets and here's what they told us...