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.

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?