Right… I’m a business user of Shannon airport, so forgive me if I have a bias. Lots of people are saying that London is reasonably well served from Shannon by Ryanair, but “London” is a big place, and Ryanair’s main London airport (Stanstead) is actually half way to Scotland. The Gatwick link is a joke. One flight a day means no way to get in and out on the same day.

If you’re going on your summer holidays, and have all day (an hour to get into the city centre, and another 30 minutes to get the tube across town, and then another 30 minutes to get out to Heathrow, at a cost of at least £40 in train fares) to get to Heathrow, then that’s fine, for the rest of us, it’s 4 hours that we’d rather spend at home with the family.

Right now I can get the morning flight into Heathrow and be in town by 11am. I can do nearly a full days work and be back out on the 7:30pm flight. Because Heathrow is such a major airport, industry has grown up around it. A lot of technology companies (like Dell in Bracknell) are on the M4 corridor within a half hour of Heathrow, but outside London. Visiting these guys via Heathrow means I get to eat dinner with my kids. If I have to go via Stanstead I need an extra 2 hours in each direction on the M25. It requires getting up before dawn and not getting home until after 10pm. My other option is a 2 hour drive to Cork to fly out of there, or a 3.5 hour drive to Dublin…..

I’m in London at least a couple of times a month. If I lose a 1/2 day on each trip I lose more than two weeks a year sitting on commuter trains, rental cars and taxis in and around London. I’m just one person, but there are large companies around here who’s entire executive group are over and back to London at least as often as I am. This will cost them serious money. While they won’t (I hope!) pull out of the region because of this, they’ll certainly think of redistributing these higher paying jobs to other locations that are better connected to the real world.

Let’s be honest, the Mid-West is a backwater. Property and pay rates here are cheaper than Dublin, but Poland (which is very well connected to Heathrow by the way) is cheaper still, so the region will turn into a wasteland without some positive discrimination. This is why there are several incentive plans, such as the NDP, to keep industry in the area. The lack of a frequent direct link to the largest hub airport on the continent will lead to a net increase in the cost of doing international business out of the region. This is A Bad Thing. It’s already expensive to operate out of Ireland. Making business people piss away half their day to get here won’t make them think any better of us.

The little Auto-Rikshaws are a scream, but it’s no fun when you’re stuck in traffic beside a geriatric bus belching exhaust fumes in your face. The heat and humidity was opressive. I was there in April and it was 40c during the day, and only dropped to 30c at night. I bought a guide book before I left home, and Hyderabad only has a single paragraph in the entire book, so it’s not exactly a tourist’s paradise! The only historical place of note is the Charminar, which was built to commemorate the eradication of a plague….

I usually remember to take a digital camera, but on my last trip, 24 hours in New York (I was in Washington DC too, but all I saw there was the inside of a conference room ), I just brought my phone. The Sony Ericsson k750i has a 2MP auto-focus camera, so the pictures actually came out pretty good! I stayed in the Hotel Pennsylvania (the locals call it the Hotel Penitentiary). The website makes it look great, but it isn’t. I had the usual New York hotel view out my window…. across an alley and into someone else’s room The most unusual and unexpected sight while there was one of OCC’s custom bikes, the I-Robot bike, on display outside a shop near Macy’s.

I’ve got some cool pictures of India & Seattle that I’ll try to get around to posting over the next few days.