Recently I was invited by Bocconi University to participate in a conference being organised by Carlson Wagonlit Travel in Milan shortly. My role was to be interviewed on video about rail and air competition and collaboration: the interview is to be translated and shown to delegates, who will be mainly corporate travel purchasers in Italy.

This gave me a good opportunity to promote IARO's members.

I was asked about competition and cooperation, so I was able to mention the work done by Fraport and Aeroports de Paris in promoting air-rail code-shares. These can replace short-haul flights, to everyone's benefit. I was able to talk about the issues in integrated air-rail ticketing and to mention the micro-sites used by Gatwick Express and Heathrow Express in particular: these allow passengers to book a flight and then click through from the airline booking site to the railway booking site to buy a train ticket in (almost) the same transaction. The excellence of Manchester Airport's regional rail connections was also something I commended.

The last question was about Italy and air rail developments there.

I was able to start by talking about the rail network developments planned for Venice Marco Polo airport which are being designed by One Works. This led on to a discussion of airport expresses - the advantages of a memorable service frequency like that of Heathrow Express (it takes 15 minutes and runs every 15 minutes). I commented that I was glad to hear that Malpensa Express is to be accelerated and diverted to run to Milano Centrale station from December, and highlighted the benefits of that to the time-poor business traveller. And I was able to end with a description of KLIA Ekspres's e-XKL premium service, explaining that I used it after having been travelling for 23 hours and felt that it was solid gold. "Isn't that what we want all of our passengers to feel - that their journey has been so good it was solid gold?", I asked.