From hand sanitisers to drive-throughs and meal deliveries with K-dramas included, travel suppliers in Asia are innovating to meet current customer needs. Meanwhile, governments are collaborating with the private sector to innovate in mobile to contain Covid-19. Vera Lye reports on the first WiT Virtual held Thursday.
Your customers aren’t travelling. So how can you solve their current pain points? That was one of the questions posed to panelists at our first WiT Virtual – Green Shoots of Recovery in North Asia – reality or wishful thinking? – held yesterday.
But first of course, we asked the critical question – green shoots or wishful thinking – and our panelists – Min Yoon, CEO, Tidesquare, South Korea; Jennifer Cronin, president, Wharf Hotels, Hong Kong; and Weichun Liu, co-founder and COO, KK Day, Taiwan – answered with a resounding yes.
Cronin, whose Marco Polo Wuhan was in the eye of the storm, reported with some glee that her group’s regional sales offices in Beijing and Shanghai are seeing good MICE leads for different China locations including Wuhan. “Also advance purchase seems to be popular for travel agencies for second half of 2020.”
She reported that the government of Shanghai has downgraded the Emergency Alert Level on March 24 from Level 1 to Level 2 with most of the restaurants, shopping malls and public facilities in the city resuming operations.
“Twenty per cent occupancy is better than the single-digit we were in two months ago,” she said.
Min Yoon reported upticks in domestic hotel bookings in Seoul. He is cautiously optimistic although he said consumer sentiment remained weak and there are still restrictions but his agency will focus on domestic travel for the initial burst of recovery.
Liu reported that Taiwanese were going outdoors and “glamping” has taken off in a big way. She said campsites were crowded. KK Day was thus focusing its initial efforts of recovery on the domestic market but Liu said building strong products for domestic travellers also means a stronger service offering for inbound travellers when they return.
From hand sanitisers to drive-throughs and meal delivery with K-dramas included
Certainly, we are seeing bursts of creativity from the industry as they adjust their products to meet current customer needs. All three shared instances of creative product innovation and clever matching of product to current market conditions.
Cronin said this current health crisis will change the way people buy or choose travel products. For example, there will surely be a heightened sense of hygiene in travellers. At Wharf hotels, all mouth washes in the amenities lineup in rooms will make way for hand sanitizers instead. This is the new soap, said Cronin. Health declaration forms are also now required by all its hotels.
Min Yoon said he was seeing creativity from hotels in Seoul, offering anything from drive-throughs to pick up hotel meals and in-room dining with private movie theatres set up in the room.
“We actually think this is a very good time to run marketing campaigns because you don’t need to worry about revenue results,” quipped Liu.
KK Day looked to the current pain points of isolation and boredom to inspire ideas for customer engagement. It now provides food delivery services, “unwind workout classes”, streaming services with travel souvenirs (think K-drama movies served with wine and snacks from around the world).
“We want to remind our customers how fun it is to travel and how good things were,” said Liu. KK Day is encouraging customers to consider and share on social media the top five destinations they would like to go to once travel bans are lifted.
Flexibility is something people will start to ask for, says Liu. Suppliers will have to consider providing more flexibility around booking cancellations and refunds as customers may be wary of sudden changes in situations that could impact travel plans.
Hian Goh, partner, Openspace Ventures, in a self-penned article on Linkedin, urged the travel industry to take action on product innovation. “Think of this as one huge product market fit failure. If you are in the travel or F&B industry, your customers have just decided at this time to not partake in your business model. How many times have we (as startups) tried to experiment on our products but found failure instead? Now is the time to pivot. Think creatively and challenge all assumptions,” said Goh.
Health Code apps, contact tracing and mask tracing – innovation in mobile to solve current problems
Innovation in mobile and collaboration between public and private sector has also led to new tech products to solve current problems. In an earlier article, James Liang, chairman of Trip.com Group, economist and entrepreneur, argued for the development of a global app that acts like an “electronic passport” such as China’s Health Code app.
“While keeping this important data secure and private, operators could work with governments and leading mobile Internet companies across the world to develop an electronic ‘passport’, and provide more precise epidemic prevention guidelines. With the ‘passport’ generated by this app, governments could, in a fluid and timely fashion, set travel, isolation and preventative regulations (like, the requirement to wear a mask) with view to the developing situation in each region,” said Liang.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency and the Ministry of Health recently launched an app to help with contact tracing after someone contracts Covid-19. TraceTogether can identify people who have been within 2m of coronavirus patients for at least 30 minutes, using Bluetooth. Its developers say the app is useful when those infected cannot recall whom they had been in close proximity with for an extended duration.
More than 620,000 have already downloaded the app which is also available to developers around the world to remodify and redistribute.
Min and Liu shared how South Korea and Taiwan had developed “mask tracing” apps to let people know where they can buy masks. South Koreans also know quickly when a new coronavirus case is found in their neighbourhood through a government alert sent to their mobile phones that includes details such as the case’s age, gender and travel history.
There is a dark side though, of course, as Min pointed out. He related an anecdote of someone who disabled his location to “check” the system and found himself promptly visited by the authorities. But he said, people were willing to trade safety for privacy at this time.
After domestic, look to neighbours for recovery
Cronin also reported that for the first time, Hong Kong’s public and private sector were working together on a recovery plan for Hong Kong. Taking lessons she had learnt when she was on Singapore Can Lah task force right after SARS, she said the biggest takeaway was putting aside individual interests for the greater good of the destination.
She now sits on two “recovery” task forces which will look to reposition Hong Kong after more than a year of turmoil with political protests and now Covid-19.
Liu and Min said that once travel restrictions were eased to neighbouring countries, they can then start reviving regional markets. Min expressed the hope that the current Covid-19 crisis will make governments realise it is better to work together than fight, referring to the political tensions between South Korea and Japan, and then with China, which severely impacted its inbound tourism in the past year.
Liu said KK Day would start to look at selectively selling regional destinations once restrictions are eased and each country gets its Covid-19 situation under control. One can almost visualize certain safe corridors being set up gradually as each country, first in North Asia and then in South-east Asia, emerges from the pandemic and bilateral agreements reached to open borders between individual countries.
All three said that the recovery of Asia will be critical to full tourism recovery and longhaul markets would be icing on the cake, given that intra-Asia accounts for up to 80% of travel in the region.
And the first thing they will do once Covid-19 is under control in their markets? “A group hug,” said Cronin.
