Matts blog

If anyone actaully reads this blog, they may remember 6 months ago when Elong acidentally sent me a thread of internal emails about lack of customer service, the original entry is here. Well they’ve struck again, I just recieved a 14Mb email with the following text:

Dear Paul and Matthew,

Firstly, many thanks for taking the time to visit us out here in BJ, we really appreciated the chance to learning learn from and share experiences with you; this is what being part of a global business should be all about.

I have taken a little time to think about some follow-ups to our meetings, and some suggested next steps:

- Monthly meetings. Topics could include:
- Cooperation on leveraging airlines
- Project updates (risk inventory, ‘fix air’, ’summer sun’, ‘kitty hawk’)
- Negotiation updates (Travelsky, other GDSs, key airlines)
- Information sharing. We are starting an industry update at least once a month and would be keen to share it with you. I hope this could feed into your biz intelligence networks, which can all be fed back to us.

I suggest that we could try and fix the first one up for early June. Matthew, would you be able to make the arrangements? (we have a video-conferencing system here now, which we can hook up to Bellevue).

- Contact between analytics teams. Liu shishi is responsible for analytics for us here, and has now been on board for 3 months. Regular 2-way communication between him and Greg would be an enourmous benefit for the development of our analytics function here.

- Documents. I have attached some of the docs we used during your stay. Similarly, you mentioned information sources that you have, such as reports on China, which i would greatly appreciate.

Looking forward to close cooperation,

Regards,

Andy

‘Paul’ is Paul Brown - President, Expedia Partner Services Group and aparently I attended a meeting in Beijing with him!

Attached to the email was 2 powerpoint presentations one giving financial breakdowns, ticket sales breakdowns and other interesting stuff, the other detailing ‘Project Fix Air’ a plan to sort out the customer service within Elong.

No, I’m not going on another trip round this fantastic Continent, but I have finally finished the write up of the trip I finished 18 months ago. I’ve not been through and grammar or spell checked it yet, and as most of it was written on my Pocket PC on planes flying around China, I suspect its not got the best level of English, but at least its up and available. To start at the beginning click here

The Met police said it would take 40 days when I sent it off, and guess what? It did!  The good side is that I finally have the UK police report I need to complete my documentation supporting my skilled migrant visa.

Wosh have carried out an upgrade to the service resulting in download speeds jumping from around 100Kb/s to 180Kb/s which means I now reach the 10Gb data cap even more quickly now