Up close and personal in travel retail
It almost feels like déjà vu looking at my colleagues’ daily update from Florida with the usual show diet of exhibitor photos, workshop speeches and social gatherings. Almost. Some of the exhibitors are wearing masks, something we would have considered weird at the equivalent show in 2019.
I shall never forget the scene at The Trinity Forum in Shanghai when the 550-strong audience stood as one to honour Khun Vichai, a giant photo of him beamed out while the mournful lament of Bill Fay’s ‘The Healing Day’ played.
Age is just a number runs the old adage – albeit one mostly quoted by the old aged. The depressing thing is that my number just happens to be rather a large one.
Just six weeks ago Nemiroff vodka was celebrating the release of a space-themed expression to honour the launch of the Ukrainian ‘Sich-2-30’ satellite. Today the distillery has closed and several employees have left to join the defence of their country.
Colder than Galway. Is that possible? Having holidayed in Galway many years ago with my two oldest kids one ‘summer’, however, my solace is that it will continue to rain there for approximately 362 days in the year (the other three it snows) while here it will get warm – very warm –soon.
Fortunately both tests came back negative for as it stands every positive case is sent to a government-run isolation facility – not the kind of Interim Moodie Davitt Bureau I crave.
New Zealand, a gentle country of some 5.1 million people, is not known for torment nor maltreatment of its people. But this was surely as bad (perhaps worse) than any form of punishment since the torture rack of medieval times.
Martell is an example of a craft spirit born long before the term became bastardised with an almost implicit naivety at best or arrogance at worst that nothing that had come before was ‘craft’.
The best airports (and Istanbul is high on that list) are magnificent amphitheatres that house not only people but emotions (sadness, excitement, anticipation, joy) and are therefore ripe for great experiences.
Who would have possibly believed back then that most of the photos of people working in the travel retail community less than two years later would show them in masks?
The darkness that dominates world headlines over the pandemic is nothing compared to the despair of catastrophe and loss in the deep south of America. We must strive to retain perspective, insist on it in fact.
“CNN and other Western media have misunderstood China. They only see China’s ‘calm’ but they seem to forget how China has firmly adhered to the path of ‘dynamic zero-case’ policy.”
I get the Hong Kong government’s position. We’re just going to have to take it on (and in) the nose. While that means further frustration for Hong Kong residents and the tourism industry, it’s all about the size of the prize. And no-one can doubt which is bigger.