How are you surviving with SARS, the Iraq war, Bali bombing and 9-11 all impacting corporate travel?
Corporate travel is still there. We have a lot of incentive accounts. With many corporations cancelling trips out of the country, we encourage them to travel within the Philippines instead. We handle meetings, incentives and conferences and are pushing domestic destinations to corporates now. We are co-ordinating closely with different resort owners and suppliers in Palawan, Boracay, Bohol and Cebu for these groups.

What is the future of corporate travel?
I think it will go down, although we cannot tell until the SARS crisis is really over. SARS has affected corporate travel more than the war. We have lost corporate groups travelling abroad. We lost a group of 75 and another group of 1,000 going to China and Hong Kong for incentive travel. Groups that were going to Australia pushed through. People now think 100 times before they travel, and videoconferencing has taken the place of corporate travel and saves companies a lot of money.

How much has the corporate market in the Philippines grown over the past five years?
As a whole, it has grown about 50 per cent in the past five years, but it is not as big as in Singapore or Thailand.

For our company, the corporate market has grown 20 per cent over the past five years.

There was a lot of corporate travel from 1997 to 1998. But many of the projects have been completed and they are not travelling as much. For example, you have 50 accounts, but only 25 people are travelling in each account, unlike five years ago, when it would perhaps be 25 accounts, but 100 people travelling in each account. So we have more accounts because more companies are accepting the services of a travel management company (TMC), but since fewer people are travelling, the profits are more or less the same.

Who are your clients?
Sixty per cent of Philscan Travel & Tours' clients are marine accounts from shipping companies. The remaining 40 per cent are corporate accounts handled as part of the Radius-PHILSCAN Travel & Tours partnership.

Our corporate clients are mainly MNCs or Filipino companies with an MNC link or foreign affiliate. For Filipino-based companies, only the owner or president travels, so they do not need TMC services. But since 2000 we have noticed more companies accepting TMC services.

What are your unique selling points?
We are known for the service we give. We offer corporate packages, international and domestic, and we are an ISO-certified company, which means we have certain standards to meet.

We not only manage the corporate travel of our clients, we also manage their personal trips such as vacations.