A call for credibility on industry Covid claims

Chris Pouney, senior consultant, GoldSpring Consulting

With a probability of 1 in 27 million, you have more chance of being struck by lightning than you do of catching Covid on an aircraft – so said airline industry body IATA to howls of delight by the beleaguered travel industry.

The eagle-eyed among readers though were keen to point out that just two weeks earlier, IATA member Qatar Airways reported (with equal excitement) that their own studies showed a rather different ratio of 1 in 8,000.

Worse was to follow for IATA when Dr. David Freedman, whose work was cited in the IATA report, described the calculations as “bad math” and refused to take part in publicity activity.

This clumsy dance with data has left our industry with some damage control to do. 

While IATA itself maintains that the calculation is “relevant and credible”, there is little doubt that the report – and resulting negative publicity – left people outside the travel industry (presumably the very people it was intended to influence) scratching their heads and questioning the integrity and credibility of such reports.

We all have vested interest in getting flights full again, but our message – and the data backing it – needs more stress testing before we ask corporates to get behind it. Is 1 in 27 million a number we can really ask travel managers to take to CEOs tasked with making critical decisions on employee wellbeing?

The travel industry is not the only sector full of often contradictory statements about what is and is not real risk when it comes to resuming business activity.  To minimise this, and to maintain (even regain) credibility, we can keep the following tenets in mind:

• Ensure researchers, authors, and cited contributors are all on the same page with regard to findings;

• Call out and explain where findings are vastly different to other seemingly identical pieces of research;

• Deploy transparent, robust and accurate methodology from which to draw its findings.

Even if the above controls are in place, reliability still can be challenged. How does the travel industry create a compelling and credible message that will resonate far beyond our own industry ears?

It is hard to convert an incredibly complex set of statistics into consumable and meaningful soundbites.  We all know numbers can be manipulated to suit an agenda or bolster weak arguments. It is this bias, or even perceived bias, that our industry can seek to avoid. Good journalists live and breathe this principle in every word they write. 

The reality today is that published research is sponsored, in one sense or another. In the case of Covid travel recovery research, reports are likely commissioned by industry bodies or suppliers who have a vested interest in people returning to travel.

Naturally, this will create cynicism from discerning readers. Therefore, potential bias must be addressed and mitigated with rigour elsewhere in the scoping, production, publication and dissemination process.

Because bias creates doubt in the eyes of the reader and brings credibility into question, industry research and reports commissioned can strive to avoid the following types of bias:

• Confirmation bias: the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one's beliefs;

• File drawer bias: it is rather accepted that when research is commissioned by companies with an interest in the results, then if the intended results fail to materialise, the report would simply be filed away and not see the light of day;

• Selection bias: the conscious or unconscious bias introduced into a study by the way individuals, groups or data are selected for analysis, where the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analysed.

In the case of the IATA study, Reuters reports that Dr. Freedman stated, “It was bad math. 1.2 billion passengers during 2020 is not a fair denominator because hardly anybody was tested… the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

For the travel industry to succeed in persuading its own buyers and people outside of our bubble to take the travel risk, we need to critically challenge future findings.

Ask whether it is something a travel manager can stake their reputation on when it is run up the ladder. Ask whether it would stand up to a level of scrutiny from a non-invested audience. Is everyone involved and cited in the project on the same page? Are there findings already published that contradict the results?

Only when we critically assess the information before us can the travel industry stake its story on research and data outcomes. The result will be a consistent, bullet proof, believable and compelling message that can really influence organisations to start travelling again.