Bad hotels can get away with charging far more than they deserve, while the good ones don’t get a proper reward for excellence. Most big organisations have a fixed idea of what they are willing to spend on a hotel room, and negotiate a corporate rate accordingly. It keeps the accountants happy, but it also distorts the market. The impression some have about business travel – that it’s all well-tanned executives gliding into swanky hotels for a carefree evening of fine dining and fancy cocktails – is just bunkum.

Pick the wrong hotel, and you’ll be lucky to get a toasted sandwich and a warm can of cola when you struggle through the door after a long day of meetings.
There’s an unpredictable variety of British hotels, and we saw the lot during our 10-towns-in-10-days-tour – the excellent, the terrible, and the shockingly exorbitant. Every morning, I earn my money talking about business people. But for two weeks, I’ve been living the life of one, constantly on the road, in a new town every day and a different hotel room every night And as Bill Clinton used to say, I feel your pain. Such an approach is unlikely to produce the sustainable, job-creating enterprises everybody craves.While applauding the fact that in modern Britain being an entrepreneur is becoming as acceptable as being a surgeon or a top barrister, we also need to ensure that those who wish to take this route realise that, just as reaching the top in the law or medicine requires years of hard work, so setting up a successful business is rarely as straightforward or as glamorous as it is often portrayed Without putting them off altogether, of course.. This is all very well and no doubt useful, but there must be a danger that – just as in the recent internet boom – running your own business might be seen as another “lifestyle” decision, like choosing which club to attend and what style of furniture to buy.

Both Carlton and Granada would also regard double divestment as a deal breaker if the sales houses were incentivised to compete against each other for air time and advertisers, costing more than £100m a year in lost revenues. If big businesses – with their greater resources and experience – are struggling, why should much younger enterprises succeed? This is a fair point, except that in the modern business world, it is generally accepted that innovation, flexibility and speed beat those other attributes.There are probably as many explanations as there are businesses. It will also please the Department of Trade and Industry, which is no doubt smarting at suggestions in some political circles that it is unnecessary and should be scrapped; it has nailed its colours to the enterprise mast.However, a note of caution needs to be sounded. Just because lots of businesses are being created, it does not mean that they are going to last. Even in times such as this – when acceptance of entrepreneurs is high and interest rates are low – many businesses collapse after a short period.Some might say this is hardly surprising.

This is no doubt good news for the Chancellor Gordon Brown, for whom “enterprise” is as much a watchword as “prudence”. Add into this the steadily growing number of women who are setting up their own businesses in order to create some sort of balance with their home lives, and it is simple enough to see where the growth in new businesses is coming from.A book setting out to help such ventures, Start Up & Run Your Own Business (Kogan Page, £12.99), claims that this year alone more than half a million people are expected to set up new businesses. But there is a feeling that young-and-growing businesses are likely to have the flexibility to embrace different people’s work aspirations. It appears that everybody – from frustrated recruitment personnel to exasperated parents – has a tale to tell of young people’s refusal to work as hard as is expected.This is not to say that setting up a business is a quick route to the easy life.