What a confusing, crazy and contradictory disease Covid‐19 is turning out to be. It has slowed travel to a snail’s pace yet accelerated digital innovation at warp speed.
It’s made us pine for human connection yet forced us to embrace a contactless future. It’s had a positive impact on climate change yet turned us into a planet of single-use consumers.
Technology has always been at the forefront of innovation and evolution in the travel industry, and never has that been more apparent.
The acceleration of digital use (we are a nation of Zoombies), acceptance and innovation is good news for travel, and I believe technology has the power to solve many of the travel‐related challenges created by Covid‐19.
One such issue is how to reassure travellers – whether back on the road or not. They want to know what restrictions are in place (quarantine/testing) in each country, what hotels, airlines, airports, railways and taxis are doing to keep them safe – single lane passenger routes, hand sanitisers, mandatory mask wearing, temperature testing, resting hotel rooms for 72 hours between guests – and how they can identify these suppliers.
We can provide that information through OBTs and mobile apps, which should be pinging real-time global travel updates. These allow travellers to assuage potential disruption, illustrating clearly how to choose Covid‐safe suppliers and making it possible to manage (and amend) their entire trip from their phone.
As rules seem to change on a daily basis, trip amends are now par for the course. Manually managing cancellations, refunds and rebookings have syphoned TMCs' resources over the last eight months.
Manually?! At the very least, TMCs should be implementing automated refund arrangements. If Covid‐19 has shown them anything, it’s that the offline model is simply not defensible against the backdrop of a pandemic.
It’s not as though this problem is going away any time soon. Covid‐19 has severely impacted booking patterns and I believe last-minute booking will be the norm for the foreseeable future.
This is a horrible prospect for suppliers, but they must continue to offer lenient cancellation policies and expedite refunds if they are going to keep customers onside throughout the pandemic. And this means TMCs must also be set up to deal with these processes efficiently. And by efficiently, I mean digitally.
Connection versus contactless
As for my second point, the desire for human connection versus the need for a contactless experience – again, technology is the fastest route to achieving this.
Travellers should be able to easily book trips, check in, store boarding passes, access hotel rooms, order food, pay and check out using their phones.
Yes, that means losing some face-to-face interaction. But it doesn’t signal the end of human contact. Quite the opposite. We’ve just incorporated live chat into Taptrip. Proper live chat. Not a bad bot. But a real‐life human answering travellers’ questions in real time because we understand that’s what travellers need right now, and it’s also what TMCs need to start migrating travellers online.
What other tech should we keep an eye on? It only took 25 years and a pandemic to reveal the glorious advantages that QR offers – it's easy to use, accessible, quick and simple to update (perfect for in‐room menus, for example). So while I’m not sure what its future looks like, I’m personally interested to track its progress.
A call for collaboration
I’m also unsure what the future of business travel looks like. I genuinely haven’t a clue. What I do know is if this industry is to get through Covid and beyond then, yes, we will need external support, but we should be looking inwardly as well.
We need to stop being paranoid and competitive and operating in isolation, and we should start collaborating so that we can all benefit from what we’ve learned, how we’ve innovated, get people travelling again and move forward together.