The Smile Train picks up pace

by Martin Moodie |
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Martin Moodie

Martin Moodie is the Founder & Chairman of The Moodie Report.

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Further amazing tales of the travel retail industry’s support of children’s cleft charity The Smile Train continue to flood into The Moodie Report.

At the recent TFWA Asia Pacific show in Singapore for example, three separate, informal and spontaneously generous fund-raising efforts took place.

Our colleagues at Travel Retail Business/TREND hosted their regular and successful ‘Blues Night’  and generated US$510 – enough to fund life-transforming operations on two children. All power to Doug, Nigel and Anouska and the members of the great Billy Norman Band.

A dinner hosted by Revlon’s Art Miller at the Tanglin Club and attended by King Power’s Sunil Tuli, Abu Dhabi Airports Company’s Dan Cappell, Mars International Travel Retail’s Stuart Bull and yours truly, raised a further NZ$300, £120 and S$110 as the internationalism of our industry translated into a truly multi-currency donation.

And at the Women in Travel (WIT) meeting a further$280 and HK$200 was raised after a raffle of items kindly donated by members.

Collectively that spelled around US$1265 – enough to fund cleft operations on 5 children.

We’re also delighted to report that The Moodie Report’s UK travel agent Phil Burdekin – surely one of the world’s most overworked men – is running the Edinburgh marathon this Sunday to raise money for Th Smile Train. Phil is a terrific travel agent (www.flightcentre.co.uk) and a terrific guy. If you want to help him smile for every mile he runs please visit http://www.justgiving.com/philburdekin

Then of course the incredible people at The Patrón Spirits Company  (pictured below) raised an amazing US$113,500 at their third annual Invitational Charity Golf Tournament in Coral Springs, Florida enough to fund operations for more than 450 children.

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I can tell you that the supremely dedicated management and staff at The Smile Train headquarters in New York are simply staggered by the ongoing generosity of the travel retail industry – a sector they had not even heard about a few years ago. Even in these toughest of periods, it’s enough to make you smile – and hundreds of children at the same time.