Davos organizers should consider moving venue to Asia
Harry Bhaskara The Jakarta Post/Davos
If you are fond of playing hide-and-seek, you will have a good time at the annual Davos gathering.
Discussion rooms in the Congress Center can be a nightmare to locate. The main conference building's seemingly illogical design is an outgrowth of the original building, with annexes continuously added to it to accommodate the increasing number of participants, today hovering over 2,200.
Looking for the site of a hall for a session or to meet a person was much like a round of hide-and-seek.
From the outside, the center in which the World Economic Forum was held is an unpretentious building with bare, gray bricks. It is a far cry from the posh building one might associate with a gathering of the rich.
Once inside, the floor layout leads you downstairs. The floors are not even named level one or two but called promenade level, after the street name, followed by intermediate and lower level down under.
The challenge was to locate each of the nine discussion halls where most of the 300-odd sessions were held over five days. It was a disaster for newcomers. The map did not help a lot as it was often less than accurate.
In addition you had to familiarize yourself with the names of some 20 hotels scattered around Davos village since they are also places where discussions were held. Many of the names of the hotels sound German, denoting that the owners are Swiss of German origin.
Transportation to the hotels was free, easy and convenient as buses traveling to the village came every 15 minutes at numerous bus stops, in addition to dozens of vans that constantly circled the village of 13,000 inhabitants.
One only needed to wave at a van for it to stop. Depending on who you happened to share a ride with, chances were it might turn into a moving debate between participants on their way to conference sites.
As in the session halls, these mobile discussions were almost always dominated by Westerners as only 15 percent of 2,200 participants -- from 96 countries -- were non-Westerners. The hardest part was waiting for the bus or van on side streets in freezing temperatures, which at times plunged to minus 20 degrees Celsius.
In the basement was the media center, a small, cramped and crowded low-ceilinged room with only a dozen computers. True to the nature of capitalism, only the rich media count, for they had private rooms. The rule is you get what you pay for.
Prices in Davos are a challenge for outsiders, especially those coming from developing countries. Lunch or dinner cost from US$25 to $75, the latter being equal to the monthly minimum wage in Jakarta. Most of the sessions had no fee to sign up but those with lunch or dinner might cost $75. The wages of a bus driver in Davos are around US$2,400 a month and for housekeeping staff in a star-rated hotel, half that amount.
Hotel rooms ranged from US$350 to $800 per night. This is four times the rate in Jakarta. Since Davos is a famous ski resort, hotels had to refuse bookings from holidaymakers during the week. Each booking for participants needed to be made for a minimum of five nights, the duration of the meeting.
The hardest challenge for Davos organizers, especially if they wish to increase voices from Asia, is to break their emotional ties with beautiful Davos.
That is, to move the annual gathering elsewhere, although Asia would be a more logical location as it is the place where more than half of the world's population live. Asia also has a lot of mountains if the organizers wish to preserve the Davos signature of serenity and a cold climate.
As such, people from warmer countries would be saved from the torture of subzero temperatures. Participants could also avoid time-consuming queues to deposit their overcoats.
And you would not have to play hide-and-seek to get to discussion rooms, as presumably there are buildings out there that have been designed with people in mind.
(The author is a staff writer at The Jakarta Post.)