Marcus Eklund describes the measures FCM has taken to ride out the coronavirus pandemic
“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall,
don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or
work around it.” You might recognise that as a quote from legendary basketball
player Michael Jordan in the recent hit sports documentary The Last Dance, but
it’s also advice that many TMCs and travel suppliers will have heeded during
these challenging times.
The ripple effect of Covid-19 began
in February when China shut its borders and corporates began putting the brakes
on travel and by mid-March trading had fallen by over 80 per cent – a swift
and severe impact. We still had some clients
travelling, particularly in the mining and energy sectors, and in certain
regions of the world, but only at a fraction of normal levels.
We had to move quickly and
decisively to manage and survive the crisis, focusing primarily on two aspects:
how we could help our customers and how we could ensure
our own people were safe. We had to leverage our agility because every day presented new challenges.
Like most businesses in the travel industry, FCM was forced to take some tough
decisions and we immediately reviewed our
processes to see where we could reduce costs. Projects were put into
hibernation; external client events, internal conferences and staff events were
all postponed indefinitely; external advertising
was put on hold; and business support functions that were previously outsourced were brought in-house.
And like all TMCs, we had to place some of our staff,
particularly in operations, on furlough, while also ensuring we had sufficient
people still working from home to manage clients who were still travelling, but
also to process the huge volume of refunds and credit. We also restructured our global teams across core areas of the business to maximise existing
resources and the expertise of our people
around the world.
We were also fortunate in the fact that our parent company, Flight Centre, secured additional funds totalling AUD $900 million.
This put us in a strong position to
secure FCM's longevity and give our customers confidence that we would remain by
their side for many years to come.
Our global management team also had
to make tactical decisions about which projects should be protected to ensure
our business was in the best shape to thrive in the long term.
One such decision was to continue
implementing new business. We had just won major global accounts prior to
lockdown and we took the
view that these clients need to be ready to trade with us as soon as business
travel resumes.
We also carried on developing our
NDC offering as the ability to give our customers access to the widest range of
content and airfares will be even more critical when the business travel sector
emerges from this crisis.
Traveller wellbeing was already high
on travel managers’ list of priorities at the start of 2020, but it has now
moved right to the top. That’s where our role as TMCs is going to be even more
important in the post-Covid era – supporting our clients with duty of care like
never before.
It’s been an enormously challenging period but, when faced with a brick
wall, we scaled it and reimagined our business. The corporate travel landscape on
the other side will be different, but it’s definitely not the last dance for
any of us.