Next Steps for Travel Brands and DMOs During the COVID-19 Crisis

Wondering how to react to the COVID-19 crisis? You’re not alone. While everyone’s lives have been impacted in one way or another, those of us in the travel industry find ourselves at loose ends because our products and services are fundamentally experiential. It won’t be easy, but with careful preparation and creative problem-solving it’s possible to mitigate the worst impacts of the shutdown. Read on for our suggestions on how to stay relevant, improve your online presence, and remain solvent through an unprecedented time.

 

Stay Calm and Assess the True Business Impacts

The first step is to not overreact. This is not the time to make decisions based on kneejerk reactions. This crisis came on us fast and the future is uncertain, which is scary and poses a big challenge in properly assessing the long and medium-term impacts. What we do know is what the situation is right now, so let’s focus on that to start. Here are the three main areas you need to assess to ensure your business or organization will make it through to the other side of this.

 

Cashflow – It’s time to take a hard look at your cash flow. Look at each expense and label them with a must-have, nice to have or don’t need it. You might be surprised by how much you can trim by dropping everything that isn’t essential to running your business. You might also find that what you define as essential has changed. The goal here is to get a handle on how long you can float with the current cash flow (or cash on hand) so you can make more informed decisions vs guesses. 

Then, if you haven’t already done so, apply for any relevant programs that are going to help you lower expenses even further, such as the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy or other similar programs in your country. In Canada, TIAC has put together a good list of resources and the ATTA has a regularly updated blog post of news, information and resources.

 

People – Your staff are the life of your business and you need to take care of them the best you can, even if you need to lay them off. We all can’t be like Tim Boyle of Columbia Sportswear and transfer our salary to our staff, but there have been several other examples of ways travel companies have helped support staff and guides who are now out of work. You’ve invested in your staff and you need to protect that investment as best you can by helping them with what they need right now.  

 

Customers – Your business would not be where it is today without your customers and it will not be here in the future if you can’t bring them back. Similar to your staff you need to provide your customers with what they need right now. And the most important thing they need from you/your brand is an honest and compassionate voice. This is not the time to sell anything. It is time to be vulnerable and open about the challenges you face. Getting angry about cancellations will not win you any brand loyalty, but being sincere about your need for trips to be postponed just might. 

 

Take Time to (re)Discover Your Brand and Realign Your Messaging

If you have sat down and struggled to write a message to your customers or even a Facebook post it might be time to head back to the drawing board to examine your brand voice. Your voice is a personality and now more than ever it must be human. Now is the time to really draw on the passion you have for your tourism business and the tourism industry. If this is a struggle for you then this might be a good time to take this crisis as an opportunity to shift your direction away from travel. You can only fake passion for so long and the survivors of this will be the ones who are truly passionate about their business and the people and places they work with. So craft more passion into your brand and let the world know why you are still going to travel (when the time is right) and why your destinations still matter.

Now is not the time to stop marketing. You should stop paid ads for your trips and destinations, but your marketing should continue. Here are a few ideas to help you think about what type of content and messages you can be putting out there now.

 

Find the Stories of the Moment –  People are spending an above average amount of time online these days because they are seeking current information on a rapidly changing global crisis. To a certain extent, we are being forced to live in the moment. So information about what is happening now is going to get a better response. When trying to decide what content you should make about something as huge as COVID-19, think small. Let the news sources focus on the global scale. Your job should be to take something big, the COVID-19 lockdown, and make it small and personal. Find your stories of the moment and share them. 

 

Keep the Dream Alive – The internet is still a place for wanderlust, maybe now more than ever. So don’t stop sharing your photos and videos of the amazing places and experiences you offer, but be cautious about it. You must be very clear that you are not encouraging people to leave their homes. Now is not the time for photos and videos of crowds of people doing fun activities together. That time will come but right now it is too soon. I would go a step further and try to avoid people shots as much as possible. You will find that landscapes, flowers, wildlife and general nature imagery are what people are reacting to the most these days. And the message is always #stayhome #staysafe #travellater.

 

Put Yourself in Your Customer’s Shoes – Travel is a service industry and our job is to take care of our customers. That shouldn’t stop now. Take some time and think about your customers. Think of what they might need right now. If your customers are families then they have kids that are sitting at home right now getting bored and lacking education. You might consider launching a project like Austin Adventures’ virtual adventures for kids. This is a brilliant initiative that fills a current need families are facing – keeping the kids entertained and educated. I’ve seen several travel companies start to produce content, from yoga sessions to cooking classes to fitness exercises, that is based on current needs. Think about how you can help your customer right now and do it!

 

Pivot. When the Time is Right

It is very easy to get caught up and focused on the negative aspects of this pandemic, especially if you are an owner or manager of a travel business and are now questioning its survival. Hopefully, by now the panic is subsiding and as the dust begins to settle you’ll be able to find some time to step back and look at the bigger picture. If you can you will find opportunities to make a difference and to grow your business.

 

Provide What is Needed Right Now – Once you have stabilized your business as best you can – cash flow, people and customers – you might be in a position to help others in your local community. Do you have skills or resources that are needed now? Wherever you are there is an immediate need of some kind. A good example from the travel industry is the hotels that have opened up rooms for frontline staff to get much-needed rest. But you don’t have to think on a grand scale. Sewing masks, delivering groceries and simply taking care of your neighbours should be where a decent percentage of your time and energy is spent right now. Your thoughts need to go from when can we travel again to what can I do now to help. We are all in this together. 

 

Focus on Regional – We might not have a definitive timeline but we can start to plan ahead to when travel restrictions will be slowly lifted. All signs point to a slow recovery. There will not be a single day where someone flicks the switch and we are back to “normal”. A slow recovery means that travellers will start local and slowly expand outwards. So, if you can, you need to shift to a local or regional focus. For DMOs this means that your ideal target market is now the people in your region and tour operators will need to focus on domestic travellers, within driving distance. This might mean a major shift in your product offering and/or marketing efforts from international to regional. To achieve this you might need help, so keep reading. 

 

Partnerships – Pivoting your business is not easy. You’ve taken years to build a customer base that knows you for the travel experiences that you offer. Throwing completely different product offerings at them might simply miss the mark and be a waste of energy. This is especially true for inbound operators whose audience is primarily international travellers. If this is you, you are going to have to find a partner who can provide you with a regional audience. Take some time to explore new product opportunities and then find the partners that can help you make it successful. Pooling resources, customer lists and skills with like-minded businesses will limit the loss and help to maintain a healthy travel community. 

 

New Normal? – There is no clear answer to what the new normal will actually look like. But we can make assumptions and learn from our past. When determining your revised or new travel offerings you should focus on what worked for you in the past and keep a sharp eye out for new trends. Now is the time to drop any products that were not performing in the past. The products you had a hard time letting go of or ones that you thought were great but your customers didn’t.  Time and energy needs to be focused on what generates income, your bread and butter. Double down on that and stay focused. If you are able to expand into new products, look for emerging trends. Regional travel will be the first and you can bet that nature-based travel will be in peak demand when the time comes. The new normal will be evolving as restrictions are lifted, so it will be important to be nimble yet calculated. Embrace new opportunities but don’t neglect your core business. 

 

Do Some Housekeeping

Once you settle down into your current “normal” you might find that you have a little more time on your hands. This is a perfect opportunity to do some housekeeping. Take care of those time-consuming tasks you never seem to get to, but are vital to future success. If you need a nudge as to what those are, here is a starting point.

 

Website – Try to ignore your current website analytics. Or if you cant, think of the complete dropoff in traffic as an opportunity to do some updates and make some changes to your site while no one is looking. There are two mindsets you need to use to look at your website. The first is what needs to be changed/added/updated to the site today and what needs to be done to improve longterm website performance.

What you need to do today is to update at least your homepage to make sure you don’t sound tone-deaf to the current situation. You don’t need to pull down all your trips but just make it obvious that you are responding to the crisis and promoting the #stayhome #travellater message.  Beyond that, your website could become a space to provide updates and resources to your audience. It can also become a potential revenue source by setting up an e-commerce system for selling any products you have and/or new ones you can create. A great travel-related example is MHO Adventures who have shifted their commercial kitchen from preparing backcountry meals to home-delivered meals in the Muskoka region.

To improve longterm website performance here is a good start of things you should update, setup, or learn:

• Google analytics: dive deep into the stats to truly understand (historically) how people got to your website and what they did once there. 
• Goal tracking: determine what actions you should be tracking on your website and set them up as a goal within Google Analytics (e.g. email signups)
• SEO: do some keyword research and then update your pages/trips content
• Blog: write some new evergreen blog posts. Topics should be about answering common questions new customers ask you
• Images & Video: do a refresh on your visual assets 

 

 

Digital Assets – This crisis has emphasized the importance of a well established digital presence and the need for visual assets that are easy to access. The brands that are staying active online today have been able to quickly produce relevant visual content. They have been able to adapt and repurpose existing assets to stay in the conversation. This is only accomplished if you have an organized digital asset management system. And, ideally, with so many working from home, it is cloud-based. So bust out those old drives and start organizing. 

 

CRM Database –  If you don’t have a robust customer relationship management system, now is when you should be embarking on the time-consuming journey to find one. There are so many options and there is no one solution that will work for everyone. Start by determining your must-haves, which at the bare minimum is a way to store your customer’s contact info along with interests/preferences in a way that you can easily create segmented lists for more targeted email communications. From there the sky is the limit. Who doesn’t love spreadsheets! 

 

And Last but not Least, Take Care of Yourself

The reason they tell you on a pre-flight safety demonstration to put your oxygen mask first before assisting others is that if you pass out you can’t help anyone. This situation is no different. So please find some time and space to safely go for a walk, get exercise, meditate, eat well, connect with loved ones and do the things that are truly important in your life. Also, take some time each day to discover a small act or moment that you are grateful for. Something that might have always been there, but now without the busy-ness of life you realize just how valuable it is. 

 

P.S. If you are feeling creative and want to spread some positivity we have a project for you! We are looking to create a community-produced video we need your help! Click below for details: