Worldspan Group

Cancer Research Appeal

Breast cancer is now the most common cancer in the UK and almost 46,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. Sadly more and more people are being affected from the consequences of the disease either directly, or indirectly, through people they know and love.

The good news is that the number of women dying from breast cancer has fallen to less than 12,000 for the first time in almost 40 years.

Thanks to improved detection and better treatments, more people are beating breast cancer than ever before and now 8 out of 10 breast cancer patients survive beyond five years.

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Fibre to the Home

During September, our Web Team completed the new Fibrecity website to launch Fibrecity’s next generation services (http://fibrecity.eu/). To allow the users to sign-up for the Fibrecity services, our web developers used geo-referencing software to match a user’s postcode with the official Ordnance Survey records. This now allows residents firstly to check that their postcode sits within the Fibrecity area and, secondly, to sign-up for ‘Fibre to the Home’. All data is then securely logged and downloadable for the Fibrecity Team to take forward.

Transat Jacques Vabre

Worldspan has just delivered the hospitality programme for the final race in the BT Team Ellen sponsorship agreement, The Transat Jacques Vabre. This race has been in existence for 14 years and is based on one of the world’s most historic routes: Le Havre, France to Costa Rica. The UK participants won places on this event by participating in a competition which was run in a national newspaper. In addition, guests from France and Netherlands joined their hosts from BT, providing a group of 30 people in total.

Guests visited the race village in Le Havre and saw the Imoca 60 and Multihull vessels in the harbour, before boarding their privately chartered spectator boat, Seafin, to follow the yachts out to watch the race start at close quarters. Despite choppy seas, the start went well, with commentary from BT Team Ellen’s skipper, Nick Moloney. The two sailors aboard BT Open 60, Seb Josse and Jean Francois Cuzon, started off with an excellent lead and, in fact, remained in first place for the first few days of this famous race.

Unfortunately, BT Open 60 was damaged in 65-knot winds on Friday 13th November, which led to a rather dramatic helicopter rescue of the crew in high winds. The yacht remained at sea, taking on water, whilst a salvage operation was put in place. BT Open 60 was finally recovered on 16th November and towed in to harbour in the Azores on 18th November.

• For more information on BT Team Ellen visit http://www.teamellen.com