Four-day work week, travel deals for travel employees, targeting the young, new and exciting road trip itineraries – what other ideas do you have for nourishing those fragile green shoots we are seeing, from Japan to China, Australia and Vietnam?
This morning, on my regular walk, I saw a rainbow across Marina Bay. It raised my hopes for that pot of gold awaiting us, that day when we can travel again.
My news feeds are now filled with more good news than bad, or maybe it’s because I am now gravitating towards those to preserve my mental state.
Just a random grab of some of this week’s headlines:
- SIA to resume flights to more destinations in June and July
- Air China plans to operate 24 international routes in June
- India restarts air travel after two months, amid chaos
- New Zealand and Australia begin relaxing Covid-19 restrictions
- Taiwan trial offers hope for restoring international travel
- Tourists back in Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay as domestic travel restarts
Yesterday morning, the Gov.sg app tells us that a new Singapore-China fast lane will start from 8 June to “facilitate essential business travel between two countries”, “starting with Chongqing, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Tianjin, Zhejiang”. Okay, the procedures are daunting but at least it offers a “safe travel protocol” to give confidence to governments, and travellers.
Among them:
- Covid-19 swab test before departure and upon arrival
- Before boarding, must produce SafeTravel Pass, negative test result, travel documents
- After arrival, adhere to pre-declared controlled itinerary for 14 days
- Must use TraceTogether app throughout stay
In this week’s WiT Virtual’s Window Into China, Nancy Zhou, co-founder and vice president business development, Flightroutes24 showed data signaling an uptrend in domestic air travel and passenger demand.
Shenzen-based Zhou has been travelling for leisure since the easing of restrictions – she said she couldn’t resist travel deals to Hainan and Chengdu, saying it’s the best time to travel despite the temperature checks, the many apps she has to have, and the filling of forms.
She spoke about how her business, acquired by Meituan in 2016, was moving to target the student market by helping overseas students to return to China, while waiting for its core market of outbound and international travel to recover.
Tujia reports changes in Chinese traveller preferences
McKinsey released its report on how Chinese travellers are thinking about their first trip post-Covid 19.
The key findings:
1. Travel recovery peak will likely come after Sept 2020
2. Young, single, experienced travellers to lead
3. Domestic travel is favoured, but undecided on destinations (almost a quarter think that their next leisure trip will be international.
4. Food and family destinations popular
5. Leisure travel groups are shrinking
6. Travellers prefer self-guided and self-drive trips over group tours
On the ground, Jennifer Li, chief business officer of Tujia, China’s largest private accommodation site, told WiT that travel preferences have definitely changed. “Outbound travel and trans-provincial travel are not popular anymore. Three-hour self-driving around the city, tours around the high-speed train circle, short-distance travel, and rural travel are popular.”
The four key words that travellers are concerned about are health, safety quality and “characteristics”, she said. “Those high-quality countryside B&B that focus on the needs of experience, leisure and oxygen inhalation also saw booking peaks. The closed-loop consumption of food, accommodation and entertainment began to become a new trend of traveling after the epidemic.”
Tujia’s latest travel data of B&B during the recent May Day Holiday showed that the number of bookings has recovered to 65% in the same period last year, an increase of 200% over the same period in April. “… current weekend tours in all provinces and cities have almost recovered, the tourism and B&B market in the next three quarters will see a more obvious recovery trend, and tours in surrounding areas are the first to recover,” said Li.
From Japan to Australia, Hoshino Resorts and Luxury Escapes see promising signs
In Japan, Yoshiharu Hoshino who runs Hoshino Resorts also reports pick-up in domestic bookings for some of his 39 properties, with customers showing preference for resorts within a couple hours’ drive from Tokyo as well as smaller facilities in quieter locations.
Hoshino, who’s always been a champion for domestic tourism, believing it should form the bedrock of a sustainable tourism industry for Japan, says the time has come for the country to really reset its domestic tourism strategy. And that means taking action and getting creative to get Japanese youths travelling again.
I also spoke to Cameron Holland, CEO of Luxury Escapes, this week on how his company had weathered the storm and how its original “Buy Now, Book Later” product saw bookings throughout the pandemic. Australia is also waking up from the travel coma, and he speaks about how Luxury Escapes will get creative about packaging its hotel experiences given the new health and safety protocol. (Watch out for The WiT Podcast with Cameron Holland next week)
It seems that currently travel’s destiny is largely out of our control. It is dependent on government decisions to open borders or impose quarantine restrictions – which might as well mean closed borders. The UK’s decision to impose a 14-day quarantine on visitors has led to an outcry, prompting the managing director of Skylight Aviation, Steven Dickson, to declare on LinkedIn that “the UK border is effectively now closed from 8 June. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot”.
What about Jacinda Ardern’s four-day work week idea? Wego is experimenting
So what can we do in travel to save ourselves? This is a crisis where it is clear no white knight in shining armour is going to come charging to rescue us. The world is leader-less. It has decoupled (as rightly pointed out in The WiT Podcast with Tao Tao, Co-founder & COO of GetYourGuide). There’s anger, fear and desperation on the streets.
Now that some of us have done all we can to save our businesses – and yes, the fight to make through the long tunnel ahead is just beginning – but perhaps we can also look at how we can help save our industry through individual and collective actions.
For example, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has proposed a four-day work week. Imagine if every travel brand adopted that? Travel employees would have more holiday time. Luxury Escapes’ Holland speaks about how Australians have the most holidays – why don’t travel companies in Asia take the lead and give their employees more holiday time this year?
Ho Kwon Ping, executive chairman of Banyan Tree, at a HICAP webinar observed that with the decoupling of China and the US, and the fact that longhaul travel is pretty much out of the picture for the rest of the year, Asia has to save itself. We need to get more people in Asia travelling. What measures can be taken to translate the concept of Asia as its own domestic market into reality? We’ve been talking about an ASEAN market forever, perhaps this is the time to make that happen for real, to save ourselves.
Ross Veitch, CEO and co-founder of Wego, introduced as an experiment a four-day work week when the company moved to remote work due to Covid restrictions. Most employees now work Monday to Thursday which are common working days between the MENA (Sun-Thu) and Asian (Mon-Fri) working weeks. As a measure to preserve cash and extend the company’s runway through this period, the compensation mix for all employees was changed to part cash, part equity.
How else can we save ourselves? Travelstart has released a video called “Freedom To Move”, declaring its quest to fight for the freedom to travel. It says, “Freedom to Move is precious to us and something we find worth fighting for. It’s something we find worth living for.” Imagine if this started a movement in Africa alone?
I recall after September 11, the-then Starwood came out with a special deals package for its employees and many travel brands followed suit. Get our own people travelling first, and that builds confidence among our customers. If we don’t travel, how do we expect others to?
It is said charity begins at home. Now that travel is slowly awakening from its coma, perhaps we should be the ones to stoke the flames slowly but surely, so that we can all cross the rainbow bridge to the other side.
• Featured image credit (sunrise over Tianjin city, China): shansekala/Getty Images