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You get a safe hotel and a great bed. The towels and TV will cost you extra but what about the toilet paper?
ACCA F1, ACCA F5, ACCA F9, ACCA P1, ACCA P3, ACCA P5, CIM, CIMA E1, CIMA E2, CIMA E3
The Tune Hotel chain has just opened up its first hotel in the UK. The chain already has 7 hotels in Malaysia and 2 in Indonesia and they claim they offer 5 star beds at 1 star prices.
Their policy is to offer the essentials that people look for in a hotel such as safety, cleanliness and comfortable beds whilst at the same time removing a number of "extras" that some customers don't necessarily want.
With rooms starting at £35 it certainly offers great value for London hotels. It wouldn't suit everyone's taste though as some of the things that people take for granted at a hotel are not included in the standard price.
There are a number of optional extras that guests can purchase. A towel for example can be provided for £1.50 per stay whilst the use of a hairdryer will set you back £2. If you want to watch TV you'll need to pay £3 a day.
If you're the type of person that likes to take your own towel to a hotel or is relaxed about whether or not you wash then you could end up with a very cheap room.
Whilst this hotel wouldn't be everyone's "cup of tea" (incidentally there are no coffee or tea making facilities in the rooms) there will certainly be a market for people that only want a clean and safe hotel room to sleep in and are not bothered about the extras.
In the past we've blogged about the BMI Weymouth hospital that was adopting a differentiation approach to business. With Tunes Hotels adopting a hospitality industry equivalent to the low cost airline models of Easy Jet and Ryan Air, this is a great example of either a cost leadership approach or Bowman's no-frills strategy.
Guests can rest assured though that toilet paper is included in the price and is not an optional extra.
https://www.theexpgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/styleguide-EXP-4.png 0 0 Steve https://www.theexpgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/styleguide-EXP-4.png Steve2014-07-20 07:39:032014-07-20 07:39:03You get a safe hotel and a great bed. The towels and TV will cost you extra but what about the toilet paper?
Royal Navy seize inelastic items.
ACCA F5, CIMA P1, CIMA P2, CIMA P3
A joint operation by the British and Australian navies last month resulted in the largest ever haul of heroin at sea. The drugs weighing 1,032 kilogrammes had an estimated British street value of more than £140 million and were found on a boat 30 miles off the coast of East Africa near Kenya and Tanzania.
This is great news for the authorities but what link does this have with the exams?
Price elasticity of demand (PED) is a core area of pricing theory. PED measures the sensitivity of customer demand to a change in prices and is calculated as
PED = % change in demand
% change in price
There is usually an inverse relationship: when price goes up, demand goes down (and vice versa).
Addictive drugs such as the heroin seized by the British and Australian navies however are an inelastic product and in fact are approaching perfect inelasticity. A perfectly inelastic product is a situation where price goes up but the quantity demanded stays the same. In the case of addictive drugs, the drug addicts will still need their "fix" so the quantity demanded by them is largely unaffected by price increases.
https://www.theexpgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/styleguide-EXP-4.png 0 0 Steve https://www.theexpgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/styleguide-EXP-4.png Steve2014-05-10 17:18:402014-05-10 17:18:40Royal Navy seize inelastic items.
Is it better to spend a penny or save a pound?
Love them or hate them but low cost airlines such as Ryan Air and EasyJet are here to stay.
Since low cost airlines entered the airline industry 20 odd years ago they have shaken up the industry.
Easyjet for example now carry more passengers than any other UK airline and the Irish airline Ryanair long ago surpassed the Irish national carrier Aer Lingus in terms of revenue and passenger numbers.
These airline's business models are classic no-frills low cost models where passengers don't pay a lot but in return don't get a lot.
In effect they only get the flight and they have to pay for everything else. Ryanair passengers for example that don't print out their boarding card at home are charged the princely sum of £40 to have it printed at the airport.
There are reports though that Ryanair are considering taking the no-frills approach to a new level.
To keep the cost of training crew and maintaining spares at a minimum, Ryanair only have one type of plane – a Boeing 737-800. This model of plane has 3 toilets on board but Ryanair want to remove 2 of these toilets so that they can fit an extra 6 seats on the plane. This will then free up space for 6 more fee paying passengers.
Their existing capacity on their standard plane is 189 so removing 2 toilets will raise their passenger capacity by 3%.
Ryanair have reportedly said that the additional revenue generated by this extra passenger capacity could result in the average price of a flight ticket being reduced by £2. There would of course no doubt be extra profit for them as well from these extra passengers.
This extra revenue for them would be pretty good but if you look at it from another viewpoint there could be some uncomfortable logistical issues on board.
With 195 passengers and 6 crew all sharing the one toilet there could be a fairly long queue of people going down the aisle of the plane waiting for the toilet to be freed up.
The risk of a certain type of mid-air accident will no doubt increase although the real worry of course is if you see both pilots at the back of the queue hoping up and down with their legs crossed…
https://www.theexpgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/styleguide-EXP-4.png 0 0 Steve https://www.theexpgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/styleguide-EXP-4.png Steve2013-06-11 18:20:132013-06-11 18:20:13Is it better to spend a penny or save a pound?
Forget your Gucci handbag, you'll just be scratching the surface…
ACCA F1, ACCA F5, ACCA F9, ACCA P1, ACCA P3, ACCA P5, CIMA E1, CIMA E2, CIMA E3
We all know that the pharmaceuticals industry is big business.
The industry is facing considerable challenges however, with a large proportion of the "blockbuster" drugs due to come off patent in the next few years.
Drug companies are all too aware that they might well need a big breakthrough soon in order to sustain their historical levels of shareholder return.
A lesser known threat to the industry, and more direct threat to us individually, is the rapid growth in fake prescription drugs. Patents protect a patent holder against a legitimate business from copying their product. It's not much use against criminality.
Fake Gucci handbags may be an annoyance to Gucci, but nobody dies when they are purchased. Fake drugs can be sufficiently dissimilar to the real product to allow diseases to build up resistance to the genuine drug. An overdose may be fatal in the short-term; an under-dose may be fatal in the longer-term.
So there's a significant incentive for all concerned to maintain integrity in the production and logistics chain that gets the genuine drugs to those in need. Countries where prescription drug usage is culturally common and poorer countries are probably most at risk.
A Ghanaian company, mPedigree, has come up with an ingenious and simple solution. Working in conjunction with bona fide drugs manufacturers, it assigns a code to each packet of pills. This is then added to the box, in the form of a scratch card.
When customers buy the product, they scratch off the scratchcard style covering on the box and then send a free text message / sms with that code. If the product's codes are genuine, a text message is immediately sent back to verify their authenticity. If not, the customer knows that they have just been sold a potentially dangerous dud.
Of course, there will be risks to this process, such as criminal elements infiltrating the process of allocating codes, but this is a smaller risk to contain than the wider risk of fake drugs, but this is a process that an auditor could even give an assurance opinion on.
Given the worldwide very high penetration of mobile phones and the cheapness of text messages, this is a fascinating solution to a big problem. Maybe in future it could be refined to also warn if drugs are genuine but beyond their sell by date (time expired drugs can also become dangerously lacking in efficacy).
What a wonderful, simple idea.
https://www.theexpgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/styleguide-EXP-4.png 0 0 Steve https://www.theexpgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/styleguide-EXP-4.png Steve2013-03-13 13:54:012013-03-13 13:54:01Forget your Gucci handbag, you'll just be scratching the surface...
What does your car number plate tell us about you?
The US state of California has a lot going for it.
It has some of the most scenic coastline to be found anywhere in the world, some great wine and with Hollywood and Silicon Valley it has a wealth of artistic and creative minds.
What it also has however is a budget deficit of around $20 billion.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former actor and now the Governor of California certainly has a challenge on his hands to reduce the deficit.
One idea that is being discussed though is in my opinion really rather clever and introduces us to a potentially new form of advertising medium.
The State is considering introducing digital adverts onto car number plates. The idea is that the digital plates would look like normal plates when the car is moving but after it has been stopped for more than a few seconds at traffic lights or in a traffic jam the device would switch from showing the car registration number on the plate to showing a digital advert.
When stationary the registration number would still be shown but would be smaller and the advert would take the dominant position.
In effect, the car would become a mobile billboard with significant advertising revenue being generated for the state. Advertising Agencies in California are no doubt licking their lips in anticipation at the opportunities that this would offer in terms of creativity.
Whilst on the subject of creative adverts involving vehicles I think that the following advert for Copenhagen Zoo that appeared on a bus in the Danish capital will take some beating.
For those of you with a nervous disposition rest assured that it's only art work on the outside and not a 100 metre long Boa Constrictor taking on a bus.
https://www.theexpgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/styleguide-EXP-4.png 0 0 Steve https://www.theexpgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/styleguide-EXP-4.png Steve2013-03-07 22:08:082013-03-07 22:08:08What does your car number plate tell us about you?