Financial & Travel Musings

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I’m sure that we all make assumptions about the weather at our destination quite often but when you’re going on a long-haul trip, it makes sense to check what the weather should be like at each stop along your way.

Round the world trips are, of course, by far the most difficult in this respect. Choosing a time of year that provides you with decent weather at each stop over on your holiday is very difficult and may even be impossible if you’ve chosen an unfortunate set of stop-overs. However, t is possible to get good weather if you select your stopovers, the timing and the direction of your travel carefully.

Although you might think that it would be impossible to get good weather right through a vacation that includes both the northern and southern hemisphere in fact it’s not that difficult so long as you can fit your trip broadly into the February/March (heading west) or October/November (heading east) periods. For example, you can usually get quite good weather for Hawaii plus South-East Asia or Australia/New Zealand combinations in these time slots.

What is critical is that you check what the weather patterns are at each stopover you’re hoping to fit in. Never assume that the climate at your destination will be similar to that which you’re used to at home. Whilst many of us will be used to the “normal” four seasons there are a lot of tropical destinations that don’t get a seasonal pattern like that and may have only Wet and Dry seasons. Countries as large as Australia have a number of different seasonal patterns within the country: anytime is usually OK to visit Sydney but that’s far from the case in Darwin in northern Australia for instance.

It’s also worth heading west on the RTW trips as that allows you to avoid jet-lag on quite extended flights (London-Los Angeles-Honolulu is the longest that’s possible in one jetlagless flight sequence). This direction usually gives you an extra day at each stop over if you choose night time arrivals although you’ll lose a day when you cross the dateline.

So, choose carefully and pack light!

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Actually, for SEO reasons we wouldn’t want to be going quite as far west as cowboy country but you get the idea… we’re a-headin’ west.

Some years back we ended up moving all our sites from an American hosting service to a British one to help our SEO efforts. It helped a LOT in that we ended up with THIRTY times the traffic on the sites as we had when they were living in America.

Move on a few years, and the sites have grown somewhat and have quite a global reach with customers ranging from New York to Shanghai. It therefore seems appropriate that we move the hosting of the sites onto a more global basis too as the customers of our customers are drawn from an equally global audience these days and, of course, it’ll help us in acquiring more customers as well not to mention somewhat more combined traffic for the sites.

The current venture is something of an adventure as we don’t know just how much the traffic increase will be. We’ll not lose any traffic as we’re retaining the original sites on British hosts, but the question is just how much traffic we’ll pick up on the American host?

Currently our thinking is that it should, in due course, at least match the traffic on the British sites. Why? Well, although the initial interest from Americans might be relatively low, there are around five times the number of Americans and Canadians as there are Brits and Irish so we only need an interest level in America around 1/5th that in the UK to double the overall traffic.

It’s going to take us a while to get there as some of the sites are quite large and complex but the expansion programme (or should I now say program?) over the past year as we added other European countries into the fold was very encouraging and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to do at least as well in America.

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With 20/20 hindsight, Northern Rock was an obvious disaster waiting to happen.

When a relatively small regional bank turned out to be writing 20% of all of the UK mortgage market, weren’t some warning signals coming up? After all, that kind of growth in market share implies a very aggressive approach to marketing and indeed on pulling in money to fund all those mortgages.

Bear Stearns, along with many pure investment banks, tends to have quite an aggressive approach to running it’s own book too As it turned out, it was a little too optimistic with the projections and ended up just as bankrupt as Northern Rock for pretty similar reasons.

The approach on both sides of the Atlantic was quite different. Whereas the UK government continued to dither about and ended up taking over the bank itself, the Fed was much more aggressive in going for what needed to be done. They simply transferred the bank to JP Morgan (”sell” isn’t the word to use given the price paid) and backed only the residue of the business that couldn’t be easily transferred.

Which is the right approach and what’ll happen next time around?

Unfortunately, neither is really “right” in the sense of being a workable solution to the problem of the debt crisis. In both cases, a signal has been sent out that significant banks won’t be allowed to go bankrupt and that the government will take over the highest risk aspects of any bank when necessary. I’m not sure that’s a good message to be sending out at the moment as it implies that there’s no risk too much.

On the other hand, would it be better to have let one of those banks go bankrupt? Northern Rock had a major slice of the UK mortgage market and large numbers of savers so letting it go wouldn’t have been good for the government at the next election for sure. Although Bear Stearns hadn’t as many private clients they’d have been pretty vocal ones given the amounts involved but aside from that the bank was a major player with many interlinking deals and would have caused severe repercusions had it gone down.

Sadly, it’s looking like these two banks are merely tasters of what is to come if the credit crisis isn’t sorted out very soon.

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