World Travel Market attendees are smarting from a two hour plus journey from Central London and the same on the way back to and from the Abu Dhabi owned ExCel Exhibition Centre in London’s Docklands, on the first and second date of World Travel Market.
The Mole is in London reporting the event to Australia and New Zealand, but over four hours a day has been spent by The Mole simply getting to and from ExCel, from the stunning Cheval apartment where the The Mole is staying, The Gloucester Park, just spitting distance from Gloucester Road tube station.
When The Mole asked outgoing Visit Britain CEO Tom Wright today, why the debacle of the first day’s travel to and from ExCel was repeated on the second day and what plans were in place for the remainder of the week, to rescue London’s conference venue reputation, sadly, he failed to answer the questions – his response can be seen later this week on TravelMole TV.
ExCel’s organisation at the event is not much better with massive queues for everything, the ExCel centre also being very dated and disorganised, with even yesterday World Travel Market CEO Fiona Jeffrey being forced to have to work behind the counter in the media cloakroom to hand out coats due to ExCel’s failure to have sufficient staff on duty.
The whole disastrous scenario begs the question about how London will cope with the Olympics, because if it cannot handle an event like WTM with about 50,000 visitors in total with the 1012 Olympics likely to be bringing to London, tens of thousands more visitors that WTM!
So, conference and exhibition organizers, the tip of the week is stay away from London as they quite simply do not have the infrastructure in place to handle large numbers of people, with the transport infrastructure only just managing to handle the demands of residents.
Tom Wright did say that the Government is spending very a large sum of money on improving transport services before the Olympics….but this comes from the man that has single handedly managed what appears to be the global demise of the British Tourist Authority, which under his control became Visit Britain, with a massively reduced budget, closing offices all over the world, associated redundancies and with Visit Britain in Australia having announced last week that they are even closing their walk in information facility, now located in North Sydney, not even in the CBD!
Sad to seek the UK losing it!
An angry and irritated Mole reporting on location from World Travel Market 2008 in London
