How The Travel Industry’s Lessons Learned From Covid-19 Will Apply For Years To Come
CEO and Founder of Koddi & PMG, and a recognized expert in the digital advertising industry.
It should come as no surprise that the travel industry has suffered more suddenly and completely than other sectors due to the worldwide shutdowns stemming from Covid-19. A recent projection from Oxford Economics predicted 6.8 million travel and hospitality-related job losses in 2020 due to the pandemic and its attendant restrictions on movement.
In a news cycle filled with complex data and market projections, one thing should be perfectly clear: The Covid-19 pandemic will change the way the travel and hospitality industries operate in the short and long-term — and anything resembling the old way of doing business is gone. A recent report from the American Hotel & Lodging Association anticipates hotel-related occupancy losses nine times worse than 9/11, and many believe it will take five years or more for travel to rebound to its pre-Covid-19 levels.
The travel companies that survive will be the ones that adapt best. Here, then, are some informed predictions about how the Covid-19 pandemic will impact the travel industry and the world economy more broadly:
Accelerate Digital Transformation
In order to survive in a post-Covid-19 recovery, hotel companies must start behaving more like tech companies. This means being smarter about data and how it's collected and utilized. Data is the lifeblood of the modern economy, but it's useless if it can't be harnessed to provide structural efficiencies or improve customer experiences. In the case of hotels, dynamic supply and demand models need to be updated and deployed in order to maximize revenues in a travel environment that will likely be different and unfamiliar after restrictions ease. With a few notable exceptions, true supply and demand for hotel rooms isn't programmatically adjusted or traded. They need to be if the industry is going to successfully adapt.
