IT is often said that variety is the spice of life and although this pandemic with its restrictions on our movements has significantly restricted our ability to have variety in our lives, it’s certainly reinforced, to me, the belief that diversity is the oxygen of business.
Diversity in every sense of the word – not just in the workplace but also in your business, your customer segments, your products and services, your ideas, your thinking, your social set – the people you hang out with are as important as the people you work with in shaping your thinking.
Miguel Ko, chairman of CapitaLand, whom I interviewed last week, first triggered this thought. He spoke about how, being a global company with a diversified portfolio of assets in different parts of the world, it was able to ride through the crisis’ ups and downs, highs and lows, and take lessons from one to apply to the other.
“… when you run a multinational across different parts of the world you go through different stages, and you use the experience of one to help the other,” he said.
I see this happening with the company I work for – Northstar Travel Group. Last year, when the US was in the dark, we in Asia had some light – we were able to hold hybrid events and were able to tap into the pockets of domestic travel that was happening with our diversified portfolio of brands, and they looked to us for light and hope.
Now, with Asia in the dark (other than China), the US is providing the beacon of hope for us. Our colleagues are now able to put on physical events and their stories and images of how emotional it was to get together with industry friends and colleagues give us joy and hope at a time when, really, the only alternative is despair.
Air travel is back in the US – in its second-quarter earnings report, Delta Air Lines signalled that recovery accelerated in the second quarter with CEO Ed Bastian saying “the surge is coming”. He said domestic leisure demand and yields have returned to 2019 levels.
And positive sentiment appears to be returning to the corporate sector as well – its most recent survey of corporate accounts, updated last week, showed that “93% of our customers said they’re going to increase travel in Q3 over Q2 and many of those by meaningful amounts,” said Bastian.
“We are starting to see signs of a resurgence of business and international travel, both of which are supporting the next leg of the revenue recovery,” he said.
Shin Hui Tan, executive director of Park Hotel Group, also spoke about the importance of diversity in assets and markets during this interview. “As a business person, I would say yes, we have to look at diversifying. Hotels are daily leases – do I look at longer term leases with my customers, longer stays, meaning service residents? Do I look at other sources of revenue, whereby I can use my hotels for the working crowd, the digital nomad? It is relooking the way hospitality contributes to your revenue, and reconfiguring your asset so you have that diversification effect. And geographically – you can imagine if all your assets were in one country, that would be an issue today, right?”
I know many travel businesses in Singapore and across Asia are now having to rethink what recovery will look like, especially those that mostly relied on China, followed by North as well as South-east Asia.
In the early days of the pandemic, in our naivete, we assumed recovery would happen first domestic, then regional, then longhaul. The way this pandemic is playing out, it doesn’t look like China or regional markets will be coming back anytime soon for us in Asia and indeed, it seems to be longhaul that’s leading the way.
Taking the reopening of Phuket as an example – this article shares key findings so far that the UK market is leading a return of European travellers with 12% of the 4,568 international arrivals to date (July 11) coming from the UK. Ravi Chandran, managing director of Laguna Phuket, was quoted, saying, “The UK market has responded quickly despite it being the UK summer months and we are delighted to welcome back the Brits who for us over our seven hotels make up 20% of our arrivals to date. Other key markets are Thailand, the US, UAE and Israel.”
The pace of recovery of your business therefore now depends on the diversity of your customer mix (including channels) and if you didn’t have diversity before, well, it’s time you do something about it.
This just-released report from Phocuswright should give interesting fodder on how the European online travel market is shaping up. According to Phocuswright’s latest travel research report Europe Travel Market Report 2020-2024, in 2020, OTAs captured roughly 64% of online hotel & lodging bookings and it projects that in 2021, OTA bookings are projected to climb 55%, with more modest (yet still double-digit) gains in subsequent years.
These past weeks, I’ve been having discussions with travel companies across South-east Asia on how they are rethinking recovery – and I’ve found that those with diversity in customer, channel, and geographic mix are more confident than those who had too many eggs in one or two baskets.
This is also probably an over-simplification but I’ve also tended to find that those with diversity in their business mixes tend to have more diverse teams, than mono-cultural teams. A team that has diverse perspectives, be it cultural, gender or geographic, tends to think more laterally, broader, and not as linear and narrow.
In the US, diversity in the workplace has become a hot topic. I see it in my own company too and I welcome any movement that will accelerate this development of more diversity and inclusion not just in work but in life.
At a time when Covid has forced us into our corners and kept us isolated physically, we should not allow it to do the same to us mentally.
There are many uncertainties out there but one thing you can control and be certain of is, the more diversity you have in your business, the better prepared you are to come back stronger.
So if you can’t have variety right now in your travels, make sure you have it in your business, the people you work with and the people you play with. Don’t do it because it’s the right thing to do, do it because it’s right.
• Featured image credit: AlexRaths/Getty Images
