As a boy, Cyril Ranque flew a lot. His mother was a flight attendant on Air France. One day, on a flight from Mauritius to Paris, he was sitting next to the window and saw one of the aircraft engines on fire.
“At that time, I didn’t know the fuel was in the wings,” recalled the president of Travel Partners Group at Expedia Group. “Luckily, the captain managed to land in Reunion and we changed planes.”
That incident didn’t put him off flying or travel “because I had full trust in Air France, and the pilots and the planes”, he said, “just as I trust that the airlines will do the right thing to address Covid-19 and just as I trust that travel will be back.”
Speaking to WiT from his home in Geneva – his mantelpiece is filled with travel souvenirs including aeroplane models – Ranque, like most of us, is clearly itching to travel again and not just locally.
“Everyone is saying it will be domestic travel but I think people want to go out and beyond and I’d rather see governments develop health and safety protocols to allow people to travel across countries rather than keep borders close. Having tourism arrival quarantine is the wrong approach.”
Ranque said a collaborative approach to set up and agree on common protocols – such as those introduced after September 11 – was necessary to instill consumer confidence. While he said the World Travel & Tourism Council was trying to do this to align different parties, “the issue is every company is trying to do their own thing, in their own race to set up protocols, but what we are missing is the in-between bits – what happens when I leave my home and get out on the other side to a hotel.
“No standards are being defined to say, ‘this is how we travel’. The moment we do that, people will start to feel confident again.”
“Now we are built for scale to process customer service and this will last forever”
Clearly, Expedia Group is starting to feel confident again about its future – the past year was brutal to the company, with layoffs and cost-cutting even before Covid-19 struck – and Ranque has been charged with announcing the company’s $275m recovery fund to help partners rebound from the impact of COVID-19 and fuel industry-wide recovery efforts. (See related article for details of the programme)
First though, Ranque agreed that Expedia had to save itself before it could save others. “Big travel companies like us, same as everybody else, are built to process $100b of transactions, not built to cancel them in a matter of days. We learnt this the hard way. We had to secure financing, which we have, so we are safe from that point of view.
“But we had to build automation to handle cancellations, refunds, vouchers issuance at a scale that we had never thought of before, to deal with the millions and millions of cancellations and call centres were shut down because of Covid restrictions. Our team reacted extremely quickly and we built all these tools in a matter of weeks – it was remarkable and now we are built for scale to process customer service and this will last forever.
“Now we need to rebuild the industry.”
Recovery package will be unlocked as and when markets open up
Expedia’s recovery programme is aimed at three levels – partners, destinations and training. It is piloting its partners programme in Asia because “the markets have re-opened the most, compared to the rest of the world. Our partners are ready. We are seeing green shoots in the US, some markets in Europe, France, Italy and Greece, and EC is aligning to open up the Schengen area, so we are getting close to the time when we can travel.”
Said Ranque, “It’s a comprehensive programme. Not all the pieces are ready or perfect but timing is important and we must get to market with something rather than wait for a perfect package. We will roll it out over three to six months. Wherever we see signals of hotels re-opening, airlines flying, consumer searches, we will unlock the package.”
Commenting on the thinking behind the partners’ programme to which it is committing $250m in marketing credits and financial relief, he said, “We collected a lot of feedback and asked, what do you want? Some said, compensation reduction but then some said, there’s no point if I am not getting business, so I want bookings, I want a disproportionate share of the demand, I want to rebound faster than my competitors.”
Through Expedia Media Solutions, it is committing $25m to help rebuild destinations and through its Expedia Group Academy, it is making its training content available to the industry. “Hundreds of thousands of people have been laid off or furloughed and we want to make it easy for them to pick up new skills,” said Ranque.
“A great time to tackle legacy processes”
Given the mantra for this crisis seems to be to “hope for the best, plan for the worst”, Ranque said, “The worst is if nothing happens before the end of the year, and we get multiple second waves and the world shuts down again.
“The good thing is we have simplified the business, cut non-essential activities, reduced cost base, streamlined decision-making, so we are in good shape and we will get out stronger, leaner and sharper.”
He said Covid-19 had forced a big clean-up of the industry. “Legacy processes are being challenged and hopefully, some things will be speeded up. For example, the hotel check-in – finally, we may have contactless check-in.”
Agreeing that it has been the biggest challenge of his professional life, he said, “Thinking of rebuilding a business from scratch, rethinking every process, rethinking commercial agreements, service processes, relationships, technology – asking questions such as why am I doing this? It’s forcing us to clean up and simplify.
“It’s a great time to tackle legacy processes that we have had for years.”
Asked if he was also rethinking the value of an intermediary given the surge in direct-to-consumer migration that Covid-19 has sparked, he said, “We are not questioning the value but we are questioning how we bring it and how we look at every part and add value.
“The value of an online marketplace is not being challenged by Covid-19. Indeed, when there is a crisis, OTAs tend to recover faster. Suppliers want to get the deals out there and consumers want to go where the deals are, so generally speaking, marketplaces tend to recover faster.”
Asked what was the biggest lesson he had learnt from this crisis, he said, “The beauty of focusing on what’s essential, to build for speed and to fix problems at scale. Rather than go for perfection, speed is of the essence.”
• Featured image credit: tovovan/Getty Images
