Executive Travel : Adjust Your Grip and Beware of Bugs

With international business travel booming, so is the risk that the naive visitor will make a costly cultural misstep in a strange land.

Sondra Snowdon runs a New York-based consulting company that tells business travelers, among other things, that a kiss on the cheek may not really be continental and that diamonds may not always be a girl’s best friend.

From her years of briefing corporate customers about the way to talk, deal and socialize in other countries, she offers these examples of good intentions gone wrong:

* One company lost a major contract worth several million dollars in Saudi Arabia because a lawyer showed the soles of his feet to a Saudi prince.

“It was a major insult,” Snowdon said. “It was taken as an affront because the soles of the feet are looked on as the lowest part of the body.”

* A woman traveling for a major U.S. corporation in Bangkok decided to go out for a night on the town. Instead of arranging her tour through the hotel concierge, she paid a man she thought was a guide to arrange it.

“The person she had dealt with sold her to a taxi driver as a prostitute,” she said. “She was not able to get out of that situation and wound up in prison because money had changed hands. It was a very difficult situation for the country and embassy. She was later released.

“I also don’t think people really understand about their personal safety and how much corporate espionage is being done, especially throughout Asia and Eastern Europe,” Snowdon said.

“Many hotel rooms are bugged. If you’re expecting really important items to come in by fax, you should have scramblers. The selling of information, or knowing who is closing deals or doing business, has become a major thing,” she said.

Snowdon advises travelers doing business in France that the handshake of choice is “a rather gentle grasp with a quick single motion of the hand.”

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A kiss does not replace a handshake unless the woman asks, she said, and then it “should be delicate and given high on the right cheek first and then the same on the left cheek. . . . The further south in France you go, the more kisses you can expect to receive.”

Snowdon warns that in Saudi Arabia, gifts bearing Gregorian calendars are a no-no in a country where the Islamic calendar is in use, that it’s “exceptionally rude” to buy a gift for an Arabic man’s wife, diamonds not withstanding, and that gifts depicting animals may connote bad luck.

Snowdon has files on 65 countries, covering everything from dress and titles to the protocols of meeting and negotiating. Her company, Snowdon’s International Protocol Services, will soon be offering clients a dial-in service.

For more information, call (212) 247-4152.