Make this the month in which you think of creativity and innovation and how they apply to your work.

It is the theme of the Double Bill CTW Asia-Pacific (Corporate Travel World) 2004 and IT&CMA (Incentive Travel & Conventions, Meetings Asia) 2004, held in Bangkok and organised by TTG Asia Media, the publisher of this magazine and our sister title, IMA (Incentive & Meetings Asia), which is rebranded TTGmice this month.

This is the first time the two shows are held concurrently. The synergies are obvious.

The exhibition is nearly seven times bigger, with 260 exhibitors. Corporate travel planners are able to seek out not just corporate travel products, but meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions products.

The conference tackles topics that are designed to appeal to both corporate travel planners and event planners. I believe CTW this year provides a refreshing change. While it is necessary for CTW to concentrate on issues such as travel policy compliance, online booking tools, safety and security, etc – as it has done in the past and continues to do this year – the Double Bill with IT&CMA offers a new slant and may set them thinking about creativity and innovation in T&E management.

Creativity and innovation are favourite topics for incentive and meeting planners. The ability to be creative and innovative is what sets one destination management company apart from the other.

In the corporate travel world, however, players focus on managing T&E expenses and alas, many do not see that this has anything to do with being creative or innovative.

Of course it has everything to do with it, as award-winning keynote speaker, Mr Randall Munson, president of Creatively Speaking, will show you in his address at the show. Each solution that a corporate travel planner dreams of to cut costs, to ensure compliance, to ensure the safety and security of the business traveller, to make it convenient for him to book travel, etc, is nothing short of a creative piece of work. With constant changes in the industry, all the more the right brain is needed to survive the competition.

Corporate travel planners, as with everybody, need to feel motivated and recharge.

What better place, than side by side with the IT&CMA world, for which motivation – the need to incentivise people to achieve greater targets – is the very heart of business?

Wishing you a productive and creative CTW.
Raini Hamdi
Editor