Like the business it covers, travel trade media has also been caught in the crosshairs of Covid-19 and journalists are grappling with their own roles and existential questions, as editors from the Northstar Travel Group shared during a WiT Virtual event on Tuesday.
As Jay Boehmer, editor in chief, The Beat, BTN Group, said, “I’m still trying to learn how to cover a crisis like this. This is different. I’ve gotten really good about covering lawsuits between GDS and an airline or capital putting money into corporate travel or travel management companies merging.
“The one thing that’s clear to me is that we’re at this pivotal juncture right now, there’s going to be a pre-Covid world and the post-Covid world. We’ll be looking back at this moment as a catalyst for the stuff we’ll be covering for years to come.”
Arnie Weissmann, editor in chief, Travel Weekly, said, “My order to my staff is to make sure that our readers have the information they need to help their businesses make it through. So number one, unvarnished – what they need to know – but to look for positives and inspiration.”
Noting that the team is doing more stories than ever and getting more engagement with its audience, he said, “that mix has to include the type of information that keeps people going, that helps them get from day to day because sometimes the days can be very depressing.”
Kevin May, editor in chief of Phocuswire, said the one lesson he’s gleaned from covering this crisis is how vulnerable “some of the biggest brands on the planet are”, “as vulnerable as any other brand simply because demand went off a cliff almost overnight”.
Online, cruise, corporate, restarting will be slow, step by step, bubble by bubble
Interestingly, the three editors, who cover different sectors of travel, had similar views on how travel will restart – and that is, slowly, bit by bit, step by step, bubble by bubble – and all dependent on governments.
Saying it’d be a fool’s errand to try and predict things in such a fluid situation, May noted that because of “the way everything is interlinked and underpinned by technology, it’s not just going to be one small thing at a time, everything’s going to have to move very slowly”.
“It won’t just be one thing happening, and then everyone comes along at the same time. It will be a slow, very mechanical, manoeuvre for everybody to get things going, driven mostly by governments – it’s the restrictions on our movements, which will control this.”
Weissmann had a similar take on cruising, which has probably taken the worst hit in this crisis. Pointing to the news that Carnival Cruise Line, one of the brands of Carnival Corporation, had announced a August 1 resumption of sailing, he said “the specifics are very telling”.
“It’s only three ports, Miami, Port Canaveral and Galveston and only eight ships. And each of those components shows some stuff. Carnival Cruise Line, of all the different Carnival core brands, has the youngest demographic. They’re not resurrecting ones where they’re going to be attracting older people. The ships are all large ships, which can have social distancing protocols put into place. And then the actual ports themselves are all good drive markets.
“There’s a good population that can get to those ports by car, they don’t have to worry about airlines or anything like that. This is really smart on their part in terms of the details of how they’re rolling it out.”
Boehmer said he’d never seen corporate travel face so many headwinds as now, which makes for a recipe for a long, slow recovery. However, he said, there’s a strong case to be made for companies managing travel more and more aggressively, with things like duty of care, risk management and traveler tracking.
“Companies will try to take more control and have more influence over where their employees go and how they travel. I don’t know if that’s a good thing for the managed sector because demand will be suppressed for a little bit, but what they do well in terms of managing risk and travelers, there’s more reason for that now.”
Brands that look after customers and build trust at this time will emerge stronger
All three also agreed that steps being taken by companies now to stay engaged with their customers and build trust will hold them in good stead on the other side of recovery.
Asked if the massive migration online of consumers during this lockdown period across the world will reduce the power of traditional travel leisure agents, Weissmann said, “I don’t think so. One of the reasons that I don’t think so is, there has been a real outreach on the part of suppliers – cruise lines, tour operators, hoteliers, resort operators – to travel agents. They’re keeping that relationship alive because they know that the back channel is going to be the key to getting out of this because the traditional channel is the highest margin channel for a supplier and you’re going to want that channel to be healthy.”
On the online travel side, May said that those brands who ended 2019 strongly will come out of Covid-19 the same way. “They have the infrastructure, and the expertise to just pick up where they left off. What is most important in all of this is going to be trust. Brands that consumers trusted to either get them back home or give them a refund, and all those kinds of things as the crisis started hitting in February and March – I think consumers will remember those and they will return to those quite quickly.”
He did not think the post-Covid-19 landscape would be entirely different from pre-crisis. “Some of those intermediaries that were overexposed financially may go by the wayside. But the incumbents who were leading the pack will still be there. And again, it’s an opportunity for Google to make even further gains. But there are some that have got some challenges ahead. I probably put Airbnb in that category.”
Travel’s fate is linked to govt restrictions, sustainability remains top on agenda
The dependency of travel on governments, the editors agree, is a frightening thought and while they agree governments should collaborate on opening borders, May said “that’s going to be incredibly hard to coordinate”.
The general agreement is that, no matter where you are, it will first be domestic travel, then intra-regional, then longer haul travel. If groupings like EU or ASEAN can get their act together, then you could get intra-regional travel going, for instance.
May said obvious examples would be Australia and New Zealand, France into Spain and Italy, and Scandinavian countries. In South-east Asia, Singapore is in talks with South Korea, Australia, Canada, South Korea and New Zealand to resume border openings when deemed safe.
The editors, as well as the audience, also said sustainability was not going to go away as a hot topic. Said Weissmann, “I think it is absolutely sustainability’s time and there’s a number of reasons. I look out of my window and I can see much further than I have ever done. When I wipe the table on my balcony, there’s much less grime and dust.
“The true sustainability isn’t in fact economically driven – if you find a solution that has long term benefits, you’ll find there’s an intersection there between what’s good for the earth and the environment and what is actually long term in your economic best interest.”
Asked for his wish for “the new normal”, Boehmer said the crisis had shown up that “there’s just so much broken, from legacy technologies to arcane economic and revenue models”.
“The new normal comes out of people just reassessing and rebooting what they do, who delivers value and who gets paid. I hope whatever the new normal is, it brings a little more rationality to the business models. The companies that come out on the other side will be battered and torn but they’ll be stronger in the long run. So the new normal will be stronger players, more rational business models and better technology.”
Note: Download the recording of the event here.
• Featured image credit: qwerty01/Getty Images
