Travel & Tourism Students and Prospective Start-Ups, Be Eventful!

As an MSc International Tourism Management graduate, I have always been trying to explain to students how important industry networking events are, particularly for final year travel and tourism students and prospective hospitality and tour operator start-ups. If you have missed this year’s World Travel Market (WTM) hosted in ExCeL, London then have a read and see for yourself why you should attend the next one.

 WTM is the biggest travel and tourism event, pulling together hospitality, travel and tourism allies and foes under one roof. Held annually, usually early November, over four days the event attracts more than 50,000 delegates form 180 countries representing hospitality, travel and tourism businesses, tourism ministries and non-for-profits from around the globe offering countless opportunities for networking and generating ideas and business. Although WTM is generally being attended by industry organisations in an attempt to generate further business opportunities, I will point out why the event is particularly important to both final year tourism students and those planning to establish their own businesses after graduation.

Investing in MBA’s Slice by Slice

Since I discovered crowd investing, there has been a stellar pitch on Crowdcube which particularly impressed me and seemed to get fully funded far faster than anything else, raising £430,000 in just 20 days.  It was a proposal for a chain of pizza-by-the-slice restaurants in London.  My own bite-sized investment left my back account a few weeks ago and the first branch opens soon.

Food companies are, so to speak, two a penny in crowd investing world so it wasn’t (only) my affection for food which attracted me.  Pizza Rossa is run by a group of MBA graduates from London Business School.  The team won the School’s annual business plan competition and was also a winner of the 2013 Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Founders Award.

Talk About Hypocrisy

One of the great things about working at a university is that you can have such interesting, illuminating conversations.  A recent one with Eliot Lloyd is an example.

We started on solid ground exploring how we can develop our teaching of strategy then ranged across Innocent Drinks, Eliot’s blog on Evernote, Antarctica, Ponseti technique, quantum cryptography and bungalows before landing lightly on the positive value of hypocrisy.  Not surprisingly after all that, we both had to get on with some work so we decided to continue the conversation through this blog. In fact we had reached the precise point where we were returning to business matters so this post will get us to that point again and then await a post from Eliot when he has some spare minutes.

The idea of hypocrisy as a positive thing is that there are some values which cannot be denied: they cannot be denied in speech but they cannot be totally denied in action either.  We are used to that idea with the divergence of public speech and private action.  The politician’s hypocrisy when they proclaim family values while having an affair is resented and condemned.

The Practice of Practice Weeks through the Eyes of an Outsider

Practice Weeks!? I have been hearing Business School students and staff discussions in the background on this rather new to me concept for quite a while. I have never had the chance to attend any of the Practice Weeks due to other arrangements up until now, when I was invited to support the PW team and 2nd year BA Business Management students on one of their practice sessions in Bedford. I have to admit that I am not directly engaged with this project and my discussion is thus following an outsider perspective.