Northstar

NEWS www.travelweeklyweb.com Bali opens fi rst medical tourism facility BALI – BIMC Hospital collaborates with Courtyard by Marriott to offer the fi rst medical tourism packages in Bali. The partnership was inaugurated by Indonesian Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy, Mari Elka Pangestu, in the presence of officials from the Ministry of Health and the Balinese government. "Ahead of BIMC Hospital opening, we began planning and training for the best of comfort and care the moment a guest returns to the resort from their medical procedure," said Courtyard by Marriott general manager, Jeff Tyler. "We carefully looked at services that aid in recuperation such as special diets and nutrition, unique spa and wellness programmes as well as ensuring wheelchair access to all areas of the property." The Courtyard by Marriott Bali provides the aftercare services to its range of hospitality while the medical facility run by BIMC Hospitality is well-equipped with the country's most advanced treatments in surgical and non- surgical cosmetic procedures, dialysis and dental care. Along with in-room and resort-wide comfort and facilities, the resort is furthermore the first property in Indonesia to coordinate BIMC Hospital, Nusa Dua specialised medical services such as aftercare visits by BIMC Hospital nurses. "We value the partnership with the Courtyard by Marriott resort as care and PATA to run workshops in Manila BANGKOK – The Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) will present three hot issues affecting the travel and tourism industry with workshops on ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) 2015, the emerging CIVETS markets, and mTourism. As part of the PTM programme, the workshops will take place on September 25-28 at the SMX Convention Center, Manila, Philippines. Martin J Craigs, chief executive officer, PATA said: "Apart from building business during PTM2012, delegates will be empowered with insights that will help them be better prepared for upcoming marketing and technology opportunities and challenges facing the travel industry in Asia Pacifi c." A highlight of the workshop programme is the full-day workshop entitled "Do You Know Martin Craigs What You Need to Know – AEC2015?" With the formation of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015, the economies of Southeast Asia will become a single trading bloc with 600 million people and a combined GDP of around US$1.5 trillion. Another workshop will be on "CIVETS and other Emerging Markets: The Potential for Asia Pacific". For more information, visit: www.pata.org. Amadeus signs global partnership agreement with Akamai BANGKOK – Amadeus announced its global partnership agreement with Akamai, the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high- performing user experiences on any device, anywhere, to improve the performance of all web-based services and applications used by Amadeus and its customers, including airline e-Commerce websites and Amadeus' own suite of booking tools. www.travelweeklyweb.com This means that customers will be able to tap on the benefi ts of the Akamai Intelligent Platform that offers route, protocol and application layer optimisations for the internet in order to deliver content and applications more quickly, reliably, and securely. Denis Lacroix, vice-president of Product Development, Sales and e-Commerce Platforms, Amadeus commented, "Amadeus of course wants to ensure only the very best global performance for all users accessing our applications, regardless of location. Our tests prove that overall response speeds can be improved by two to three times, and in some cases up to nearly fi ve times previous speeds. We very much look forward to offering this service to our existing customers across the Amadeus portfolio." The partnership between Amadeus and Akamai was trialled through test scenarios for five Amadeus customers from 28 countries worldwide. As part of the pilot for airline e-Commerce customers in particular, one large network carrier's home-page response time performed 3.7 times faster than before. At the same time, the response time for accessing Amadeus' owns Flex Pricer calendar via the Amadeus e-Retail engine was 3.1 times quicker than previous speeds. 19 JUNE 2012 | TRAVELWEEKLY ASIA ■ | 3 safety should carry on after our clients complete their medical procedures," said BIMC Hospital Group founder and chief executive officer, Craig Beveridge.

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