Asia's Bargains

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Individual E-mail accounts, personal exercise equipment--even vibrating massage chairs. It may sound like a business traveler's Xanadu, but it's business service as usual at Hotel Phoenix in Singapore after its recent $7.6 million renovation. Not only did the makeover boost the business hotel's ranking from 3 1/2 to four stars last year, but for the additional comforts, guests are now paying a mere $87, about $20 less than they were paying a year ago. "It's a matter of repositioning and offering true value for money," says Margaret Low, the hotel's marketing director.

To no one's surprise, business travel is faltering beneath the weight of the economic turmoil in Asia--though often to the benefit of those who still travel there. More of them are likely to be from the West, since preliminary data indicate that, overall, Asians are staying home more these days--most dramatically in battered nations like South Korea, where it's considered unpatriotic to spend money outside the country. Last December, Korean airline companies, at the urging of the national tourism association, staged a demonstration at Seoul's Kimpo International Airport asking passengers not to fly abroad. Even in Singapore, where the number of inbound business visitors increased nearly 9% in 1997, business-oriented hotel-occupancy rates have dropped, and the city-state's premier Suntec convention center is experiencing 15% to 18% fewer visitors and exhibitors than previously. "People are coming to troubleshoot," says Renton de Alwis, head of the National Association of Travel Agents Singapore. But clearly, they aren't staying long enough to help the ailing tourism industry.

Not only are fewer Asian execs hitting the road, but also when they do travel, the purse strings are much tighter. From Japan's Nissan Motor to South Korea's Shinsegi Telecom, employees are being told to walk through business class to economy on airplanes and to downgrade from five-star hotels to four- or even three-star establishments when they land. "People used to buy normal tickets so they could change schedules a million times, but nowadays people fix their business meetings according to the schedule of their air tickets," says Yuko Sugihara, a Tokyo travel agent who specializes in planning executive travel.

Ahn Suk Hee, 31, a South Korean fabric salesman, knows this all too well. Ahn bemoans the fact that he can't cut back his traveling, because cloth must be "felt and seen." He skips meals, crams more meetings into an already tight schedule and grabs public buses instead of hailing cabs. "When I jokingly told some of my business contacts to pay for meals, they took it seriously," says Ahn, whose belt tightening has worked perhaps too effectively--he claims he lost 8 lbs. with all the extra running around on his last business trip. Other pleasurable business habits are also taking a pounding. Says Ryu Dae Hee, a Shinsegi Telecom manager: "It is no longer affordable to go drinking with leftovers from the travel budgets, and our business counterparts don't seem to expect treats anymore."