Acronym

Things get a little different when you ‘step offshore’ to inspect sites for a possible conference.

It all starts at the Bangkok airport – I was met by a uniformed driver in a Mercedes.

The first thing that hits you at the hotels is the service. Multiple people escort you and you bags to the room, and there is no discreet cough for a tip – they are gone before you can reach into a pocket. The second thing is how new and clean the rooms are. Huge bathrooms with separate showers and double sinks. A bathtub that you can almost swim laps in, a bedside console to control lights, TV, A/C and drapes (only seen at the Wynn in the US by me) and a TV the size of a movie screen.

And the rate I was quoted for my 2010 event? $225 a night. Only one hotel in town quoted me a rate over $300 a night, and they were almost apologetic about it!

The cost issue in Bangkok is an interesting one. Yes, you can get a (fake, and bad ones at that) Rolex for $25, and knock-off t-shirts for $3. You will notice that the people buying this junk are all western. The Thais are in the many high-end malls that surround the better hotels, shopping at stores like Prada and Gucci. Similarly, you can get a great meal at a ‘local’ place for $5, but I paid over $35 for the dinner buffet at a good hotel. Overall for an event, your costs will be lower than had you done it in a major western location like London or San Francisco – but not exponentially lower. Realistically, the greater the ‘labor input’ to what you are buying, the greater the savings. So the cost to rent an LCD might seem about the same as in the US, while the cost of an engineer to run A/V for the day would be much less.