The travel and hospitality industry have survived many crisis situations. Terrorist attacks, natural disasters, epidemic diseases, soaring oil prices, civil wars, international wars: over the past 20 years we have had more than our fair share of this stuff. Today’s recession is different. Today’s recession is the result of a failure of the economical system. After a while –somewhere end 2008, beginning 2009- everybody realized that a lot of old securities had gone: big banks could actually collapse, countries could actually go bankrupt, successful and respected business tycoons could actually turn out to be crooks. Whether you run a hotel, an airline or a seminar center: if you are waiting for business as usual to come back, you could be in for a long wait. Read on to see how deep you are in trouble if you still hope that the good old days will be back soon.
Companies all over the world have realized that they have to manage all components of their business much more tightly. And one of the components that can produce quick, relatively easy results, is travel. For our clients, the New Normal has started – and it has some very important consequences for our way of thinking. We should reconsider some old certainties, some “eternal truths” of the sector.
“I’ve seen it all” is not longer an accepted reaction to change. “We have survived till now – no reason we will not survive this time” is a rather career killing remark nowadays. Because our clients have realized that tomorrow’s business success will depend for a big part on attention to detail. And travel is a very important detail for many clients.
-We think that airlines should strongly reconsider the old business class – cash cow model. It will be hard for a corporate traveler to defend business class status. There is more: less and less travelers will even try to defend business class status. Because penny-counting has become an integral part of good behavior.
We think that hoteliers should strongly reconsider the old peak time-cash cow model. It will be hard for a corporate traveler to defend sky high hotel expense accounts, stating that “he had to be in town on that very, very busy week”. There is more: smart ways to avoid “black out dates” will be encouraged and rewarded.
We think that seminar centers should strongly reconsider the huge groups- cash cow model. It will be hard for a meetings and events organizer to defend big budgets and huge spendings. There is more: the organizers will be asked to show the money that they actually saved for their clients by being creative or just straight, hard bargainers.
The New Normal means new benchmarks, new alliances, a new type of negotiation and an overall honest level of price setting. Today’s recession is a resetting of a lot of “old truths”.
The travel and hospitality industry have survived many crisis situations. Terrorist attacks, natural disasters, epidemic diseases, soaring oil prices, civil wars, international wars: over the past 20 years we have had more than our fair share of this stuff. Today’s recession is different. Today’s recession is the result of a failure of the economical system. After a while –somewhere end 2008, beginning 2009- everybody realized that a lot of old securities had gone: big banks could actually collapse, countries could actually go bankrupt, successful and respected business tycoons could actually turn out to be crooks. Whether you run a hotel, an airline or a seminar center: if you are waiting for business as usual to come back, you could be in for a long wait. Read on to see how deep you are in trouble if you still hope that the good old days will be back soon. 
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