'Nobody will miss out anything during Travex'

TTG Asia Media Pte Ltd, which organised the Travel Exchange (Travex) for this year's Asean Tourism Forum, sees millions in deals being made this year after sellers and buyers were carefully matched up prior to the meetings.

TTG Asia Media Pte Ltd Managing Director Darren Ng said "nobody will miss out anything" during Travex as the company had cleared the way for the sellers and buyers to make their deals.

He added that with close to 400 buyers, it has been planned out so that the ratio between buyers and sellers are one-to-one. "So now every few minutes a buyer will always be able to see a seller, so there isn't like a thousand exhibitors and only 300 buyers, then the ratio is wrong. The ratio that we have come up with is good, so nobody will miss out anything."

Overall TTG Asia Media had ensured that there are quality buyers and sellers at this year's Travex, he said.

With each buyer and seller given 22 appointment slots per day over a period of two days, and each appointment not being more than 20 minutes, there was no room for distractions, he said. "Some of the deals will be concluded here and many would not be concluded here, the business dealings can amount into millions of dollars and with close to 400 buyers, sometimes 20 minutes is too short to conclude a deal," he said.

Before the buyers and sellers arrived in Brunei, 60 per cent of the appointments had already been matched by TTG Asia Media, based on mutual requests which were tracked by an appointment matching system. "The balance of the appointments, which is probably about 12 to 13 appointment slots is empty and there would be a session for the buyers and the sellers to fill up the extra appointments," said Ng. The buyer and seller appointment sessions were concluded yesterday where a total of close to 400 buyers and 314 sellers organisations, with an estimated 750 seller delegates, made appointments for business discussions which start today.

Ng said that the buyers are quality buyers that have been streamlined and been categorised as "quality" buyers, so the sellers and the appointments will not have their efforts wasted. "TTG is a global brand and we have our affiliates such as TTG United Kingdom, TTG Russia, TTG China and so on, so we have our contacts with the affiliates, and with over 35 years of experience, we roughly know who the major players are," he said. He added TTG Asia also used its own database to send in names of people who would like to go to the event.

"We managed to get about a thousand groups to register, and it is easy to say that you're a buyer and you want to come, but some may be genuine buyers and some may not be so we have to identify them, and we narrowed it down to just about 300 buyers, which is sufficient," said Ng. He said narrowing down the buyers wasn't an easy task and the firm had to follow up with the interested parties by asking them more in-depth questions. The Brunei Times