HAVING two regional airports makes travelling for international business accessible from Warrington.

Last week two colleagues and I visited three regions of Malaysia and Singapore.

The objective was to promote university work across the world and meet with existing partners in the region.

We set off on Sunday morning, with a taxi to Manchester Airport and arrived back eight days later on Monday lunchtime.

During that time we had taken eight flights, visited four major cities, booked into three hotels and suffered an eight hour time-shift.

We had also spent two nights on the plane, around 24 hours in airports (including waiting for transfers), 37 hours actually flying and had travelled a total of around 20,000 miles.

Our hosts were always gracious and served food ranging from delicious to interesting and difficult to identify (sea snails were not too bad!).

We were in areas which included a world heritage site and an area of special scientific interest, but saw little of these as we were in meetings, catching up on e-mails or trying to get some sleep at the hotel between planes!

The trip will have paid for itself more than 10 times over within a year or so with the new business generated. The jetlag is worth it.

LAWRENCE Bellamy writes a business column for the Warrington Guardian.