There have been plans announced to open the Park Inn Dubai Free Zone hotel by the Rezidor Hotel Group. This hotel will be opening in 2012 and will be conveniently located for business travel just 1.8km from Dubai International Airport and its Terminal 2.

The facilities will appeal to many businesses with its plentiful conference facilities and meeting rooms. There is planned an excellent restaurant offering a wide range of cuisines, leisure facilities including a spa, swimming pool, fitness centre and for those with twinkling toes even a 575 sqm ballroom!

The hotel is to be situated in the Free Zone district of Dubai Airport, a district that houses around 1,300 businesses in the logistics, IT and aviation sectors.

Rezidor is the parent company of Park Inn and has a over 30 airport hotels up and running or in progress across Europe. The Dubai Park Inn marks the first airport hotel for the group in the Middle East. In Egypt this year the Radisson Blu Hotel will open in Cairo. There are further plans for the hotel group to expand into the Middle East as well as Europe and Asia which is fabulous business travel news.

Popularity: 3% [?]

There are due to be new flights included in the flight portfolio of Etihad Airways to Hyderabad in India from November. This initial four times per week flight will increase to a daily flight from 2010.

Hyderabad, the state of Andhra Praddesh’s capital city, is the seventh Indian destination to be offered by Etihad. These flights are served by the Airbus A320 which has 120 economy seats and a further 20 seats for business travel. The CEO of Etihad, James Hogan, commented on the new flight when he said:

“Etihad has made no secret of the fact that it wants to build up its Indian services and looks forward to expand its flying programme to the country with the launch of this exciting new service. Hyderabad is a key Indian destination not currently served directly from Abu Dhabi.”

The airline views this addition as a great opportunity not only for Etihad Airlines but also the wider Hyderabadi community working and living in the Emirate where the news of the flight has been welcomed.

In addition to increasing point-to-point traffic the airlines expects Hyderabad to be an important addition to the Etihad network. The airline forecasts popular traffic flow between India and both Europe and North America.

Etihad is also looking to secure flights to Abu Dhabi and also other Indian destinations such as Bangladore.

Popularity: 10% [?]

American Express has taken the difficult decision to close down its call centres for business travel, costing around 4,000 jobs throughout the globe. This amounts to 6% of Amex’s workforce worldwide but should help the company achieve its target savings of $800 million.

American Express is hoping to save $175 million through cutting employment figures and saving $500 million on marketing.

Kenneth Chenault is the CEO of Amex, he added:

While we have remained solidly profitable at a time when some parts of the card industry were incurring substantial losses, we continue to be very cautious about the economic outlook and are therefore moving forward with additional reengineering efforts to help further reduce our operating costs. We believe these efforts will put us in a better position to remain profitable and free up some additional resources that will be reinvested in the business to make sure we can take competitive advantage of opportunities as the economy begins to rebound.

Popularity: 96% [?]