Clearly COVID-19 is alien to us. “How long until’… we can expect “a new normal” that is economically sustainable? “I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade here…,”(shout out to the late great Bill Paxton), but COVID-19 is here to stay and for all we know, COVID-20 is hiding in ambush between the shingles of some armadillo-looking creature that is supposed to work like Viagra if you snort its dried up skin. (As the boomers get older… ) In reality, the stress that customers, teams, and each of us are facing is likely to be the only thing on the rise. If we don’t account for this and instead use this time wisely, it can greatly impact both short and long-term progress we can all make during the rebound. In the realm of travel management, what’s your TMC doing to prepare for the “a new normal?”
Aliens aside… one of the smartest folks I know in business seared in my mind the importance of seeing your team’s progress like that of an inchworm. On a quarterly or annual basis, growth charts of any organization’s revenue or profitability might be charted with steady lines – either up or down – but if you truly understand how most teams work, “the friction” that an organization or customer feels in working with your team, is similar to the movements of an inchworm. Whether you’re leading yourself or a global team – this analogy is an important one.
To move forward, an inchworm moves its back feet up towards its front feet. The horizontal space represents the stress that a team feels while conducting operations – at that point, the inchworm has its entire body bunched up over that little area. Its body looks deep compared to the stress it feels and the body looks like it’s overly designed to support the legs in such close proximity. Then the brain of the inchworm (its leadership) coaxes the front legs forward and suddenly the inchworm is stretched out and super thin in comparison to the area it’s covering, so in this model, it’s feeling more stress. Then the back legs move, and the little critter begins to bring the depth of itself back, and the normal body of the worm returns as it prepares to move again.
COVID-19 as a Catalyst
We’ve had to make the tough choices that every TMC is making and are preparing for what’s going to happen when our world moves back to the new normal. Those two statements hold each other in tension. Every TMC has had to make cuts in staffing to survive and needs to be ready for the rebound. The opportunity now is to be prepared.
What’s Ahead
We’re prioritizing our actions based on what we know is true – “Cash is King” and “adaptation is the best survival skill”. For any leader touching a travel program, a key question should be determining their program’s value of “unused airline credit” – which is a highfalutin way to say “unused tickets.” We have the most unused tickets we’ve ever had in our history as a company. For most travel programs, airline tickets make up 80% of travel programs dollars. So getting a handle on unused tickets is vital.
What We’re Doing
We’ve redirected our strategic programming assets to the crisis at hand. We’re seizing this slow period of booking to drive a new level of automation into the entire process of managing unused airline credits. Our goal is to use the recent advances we’ve made in the ticketing process for supporting an individual meeting’s travel policy, to automate the unused airline credit reporting and processing in a touchless manner. We’ve already brought the crisis of cancelling trips and COVID 19 specific travel reporting to a new level and we have a list of friction points we are working on next.
Inchworm
Our goal is to endure the COVID-19 crisis and emerge stronger in as many ways as we can. We know in the end we will be better than before at serving the complex needs of the travel ecosystem. Do your travel reports accurately show future trips or are their trips on them that are cancelled? Will you have access to an accurate list of unused airline credits when the “King” calls? We already set the standard for managing unused airline credits and I cannot wait to show what we have coming next. If you’re feeling stretched, we can help you adapt (hey -or at a minimum share with you a vision of the future as a goal with your current provider). We’re at [email protected]
