The holidays next year will be to a great extent affected by the economic recession most countries suffered this year. That however does not mean that people will not go on holiday, but that instead they will be more careful with how and on what they spend their money. Holiday makers will spend more time searching for great deals, such as exploring new travel destinations to find the best bargains and joining Online Travel Agencies (OTA) to gain good discounts. Below are some of the predicted top travel trends for the year 2010.1 – Looking for budget optionsEconomical holidays will the key deciding factor this year, with holiday makers searching out the best budget details and discounts. Make sure when you plan your holiday this year, not to just go for what looks like the best rate, but hunt deeper for complementary give-aways, such as a free night’s stay on a multiple night stay, gift cards, spa credits, coupons and free dining etc.2 – Eco TravelHumans are slowly but steadily becoming more aware of their impact on nature. Think ‘green’ is the trend these days, with its effects being felt even by the travel industry. Most travelers look for eco friendly holiday options, holidays that cause minimum damage to nature. Eco travel was born out of this need and is a continuing trend for 2010.3- Mixing business with pleasureThe world is always on the go, with most travelers finding it more economical and viable to mix business with pleasure. Nowadays business travelers look for accommodation options that cater to all their business needs while providing leisure activities as well, so they can enjoy the best of both worlds.4 – Latin adventureLatin America is finding itself growing more and more popular with travelers as a luxury travel destination.5 – Train TravelRail travel in Europe has grown popular, as this is an economical way of traveling while enjoying the wonderful scenery on the way. This has become even more popular with the new high speed rail links into Spain and Italy.6- Going MobileWith the growth of mobile applications and capabilities, it is now even easier to plan your travels, such as tracking flight information and planning itineraries. Mobile phones now play a very important role for travelers in helping them with their travel planning. They are used to receive information from travel agents etc and are fast proving to be invaluable to travelers.7 – One platform for travel plansWith the busy schedules most of us have, it is easier to have one central platform from which to plan your travel details. This way you can keep track of everything happening in the travel industry, be up to date on the latest happenings and not just make one off purchases. The Internet offers strong travel centric sites where such central services are offered, so that people can plan every aspect of their travels, from creating the trip, to searching for accommodation, getting advice about the intended trip, finding the best deals down to updating profiles so as to keep friends and family informed.8 – Adventure TravelThe year 2010 will find people looking for holidays with more action. Most now look beyond the standard and look for adventure such as jumping out helicopters, skiing, safaris, bungee jumping as well as more personalized holidays with private tours of museums and art galleries. For the more adventurous a growing trend is to take a high-speed car tour around major cities!9 – Seeking out new hotspotsAs with everything in this world trends change. As travelers expand their travel horizons, China, India and the Gulf States find themselves growing into the latest hotspots. This trend will grow more in 2010 as travel to the ever popular European destinations at the moment for most, is not economical. So traveling to China, India and the Gulf States gives the traveler an exotic holiday while being easy on the purse, with favorable exchange rates and low travel costs.
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Expert Corporate Travel Management and the Beauty of It!
The beauty of corporate travel management and why taking advantage of an expert advice is a must! Arranging a trip to your dream getaway can potentially be extremely difficult, principally when you don’t have the knowledge by any means on the subject and how you’d go about with the arrangements.That’s when the beauty of obtaining professional and expert corporate travel management would come in handy. A corporate travel management expert will literally carry on all the tasks to secure all reservations and plans and all you’ll have to do is enjoy your trip.What exactly are the advantages of having an expert corporate travel agent arrange your travel for you?Savings; one of the main perks is being able to spend less, as these business travel consultants could guarantee discounts and exceptional offers that you most likely won’t find on your own. Novice travel planners usually jumps on the first offer that they come across with. An expert travel agent however, look further than the special offers and examine all the minuscule pieces of information that could very well help you to get more than your money’s worth. One perfect example is if you were to visit Disney World in Anaheim or the Bahamas or getaway to Italy, an expert corporate travel agent could most definitely assist in getting you a beautiful hotel, accommodation package along with an exceptional discount. If it’s not reason enough to take advantage of having the assistance of an expert travel agent.Time; aside from the money, is what you can also save yourself a lot of. Planning and arranging your trip all on your own, could definitely be a huge time waster, since you don’t have the exact skill set to obtain the best deal for you as well as you don’t have the idea of where and how to start. By contacting an expert corporate travel agency that will provide you a dedicated business travel consultant, you can be rest assured that you will get the best travel management . They can have everything arranged for you just by simply letting them do all the work for you.Going on a trip with the family is undeniably an awesome way to escape from the common complexity of life. And you don’t want to ruin that precious time and moment with the family simply because you have not planned the trip correctly, lest it all turns out to be a disaster! Botched travel arrangements are a result of reckless and inexperienced trip planning and bookings. If you don’t plan your trip accordingly or you didn’t acquire expert advice and have them do it for you, your trip could well turn out to be a nightmare. Consider taking advantage of a corporate travel management , the return of investment will really pay off. As it guarantee you in saving money, time and effort in the long run.Do not end up experiencing a nightmare of arranging your trip on your own, you don’t want to spoil your vacation and end up in a disaster just because you thought you could do it on your own. Planning a trip and arranging travels is a very delicate task that we have to leave it at the hands of the experts in corporate travel management.Careful travel planning is not simply going online and arranging the bookings, reservations and accommodations on your own. The reason why you want to get away is because you want to relax. SO why give yourself a headache in arranging them all on your own. Let the expert do that for you, they can get you deals more than your money’s worth. The only thing you need to take care of when you’re planning to have a vacation is decide where you want to fly to and what you can do when you get there and enjoy every minute of it. Relieve yourself of the hassle of going through all the dealings and arrangements. An expert corporate travel agent can do that for you.So, the next time you are planning to go on a vacation or if you are tasked with arranging your company’s team building events or corporate travels, consider partnering with a corporate travel agency who can provide you with the best options.
Network Management Solutions For Service Desk Software
Monitor the heartbeat of your critical business services.Many organisations monitor the health of business services using infrastructure management tools. Infrastructure management tools monitor and report on issues with the underlying hardware, software and networks supporting the services required by the business. In addition to management tools, most organisations have implemented service desk software to manage the logging and resolution of issues with the underlying infrastructure. Often the infrastructure management and service desk/technical support groups operate as silo departments. Typically, the systems used by these departments are not tightly coupled because it requires extensive effort and cost to integrate. We believe that it is critical that these groups and systems are fully integrated so that the business benefits from a unified, end-to-end service management approach.Providing end to end service management means that you need to be in control of all factors that may influence your service. What many organisations tend to overlook are the alerts which are triggered by infrastructure management tools. These alerts can throw your service management planning into chaos.Defining Infrastructure Alerts
Alerts have a direct impact on your level of service. It is important to measure IT’s performance in addressing these alerts and the impact it has on services provided to the organization. Many types of alerts are entered into Incident Management. Since most organisations do not properly identify alerts, they run the risk of not being able to track which incidents were created from management tools and which incidents were created by IT staff or end users. Recognizing the source of the incident will help organize the services that IT provides and ensure that normal day-to-day work does not suffer.Following are examples of the types of alerts from most management systems:1. Alerts that require immediate attention.
2. Wake up alerts
3. Awareness alerts1. Alerts that require immediate attention
These alerts are the most important to your organization. For example, this could be a message saying that your server has gone down, possibly because a fan is not working (for example). If the server runs your organization’s critical applications, once identified, all appropriate resources must immediately address the issue.2. Wake up alerts
Messages from your system to warn you that you need to act on something, which is less important but must be done.3. Awareness alerts
Messages that just inform you how the systems are doing, what the status is, etc…Typically, these alerts are managed by different priorities and different SLA’s, which will have a different impact on the service of your organization. And managing the service of your organization is something that needs to be supported by your service desk software solution.Service Desk Software Configuration and Integration with Monitoring ToolsThe organization has to ensure that when an alert is generated by the management tool, a ticket is immediately logged in the service desk software solution. The service desk software must be configured so that it is able to recognize the type of messages and automatically assign the ticket to the appropriate group or individual. Service thresholds and service rules can be defined to manage the resolution of the ticket over its life cycle.Running reports and setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) against the alerts and the time to resolve will help you to improve your service instantly and help you keep control of all aspects that impact your service, using one single front end solution which is already there: Your Service DeskIn order to provide end-to-end service management you have to integrate your service desk software with infrastructure management tools. One popular application is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). SCOM will be configured to monitor the infrastructure for specific alerts. When a configured alert occurs the ‘event’ is forwarded to a central SCOM server, where a database is held which includes a history of alerts.The ease of integration with popular software products has often been a moot subject, however this has now been resolved.