Google & Travel Value Chain Structure

What we are seeing today is something completely unprecedented. I’ve been in the travel industry since the late 90s, and I’ve never, ever seen anything like this. In our case, I’m currently working as a C-level executive, in a hotel company. We’ve closed down all of our operations, which means 100% of our 120 hotels. This is something unheard of. We are seeing almost all the airlines in the world grounded, which is something, again, unheard of. All the cruise lines completely moored. The travel world has come to a complete standstill. I participate in some of the think tanks that the World Travel and Tourism Council organize and we were discussing these issues for the industry.

In the short term, we’re looking at losing 75 million jobs in the travel and tourism industry and think about the impact that this will have, in many societies. It is difficult to gauge the economic loss, but some numbers are pointing to over a two trillion figure, which is difficult amount to understand. In countries where tourism and travel plays a substantial role within GDP – think about Greece, Italy, France, Spain or even the US – this is going to make a dent in all of those economies. I used to be vice president of the World Tourism Organization, and I’m still invited to some of their think tanks. The other day, we were looking at some numbers with them and, actually, the volumes of travelers are going to slide back eight years, to the volumes that we had in 2012, roughly. All of this has happened in almost no time.

It is true that we knew about the virus that had started in China, towards the end of last year, around the Western Christmas period, but it was a bit of a blur and a bit of a China thing. No one was really paying too much attention, until it really hit Italy and then things became serious. Since the end of February, to the second, third week of March, literally in three weeks, we saw over 180 countries in the world, taking extreme measures. The measures were to various degrees, but all of them were extreme, with some of them closing their borders completely.

People usually reference a crisis such as this, to things such as wars or epidemics, in the past. This is something that is completely unprecedented. We are all in uncharted waters, which makes it especially difficult. I was in a discussion today, with PricewaterhouseCoopers, trying to see if we can put in place a medical passport, for Covid-19, to make that a standard in Europe, for the outgoing and inbound countries. Again, what we are seeing, is something completely new, which is going to require tremendous efforts, to get back on track, but I’m certain that we will get back on track. The problem is, how long will that take?

I hope so, but it’s difficult to say. If we look at it from the position of a bottle that is half full or half empty, the approach is the following. Q2 is completely wiped out, so we’ve lost all of the business for Q2. It is true that we were hit by the virus around the start of March and then all of the figures and the occupancy rates, went down the drains, quite quickly. As a company, we are now considering that May is completely lost; we have closed sales and we are not accepting any bookings. Most of the countries – not even hotel chains, I’m talking about countries and home destinations – are operating in the same manner. For June, it remains to be seen. We are revising the policies and the sales activity, on a day by day basis.

The interesting piece is, when you look to Q3, the numbers are still pretty stable. By stable, I mean, we haven’t seen a massive wash of business going away, just yet. It is true that the wash that we saw in Q2 came in different waves, as the virus hit different countries and moving from the East to the West. But Q3, surprisingly, in our books and in talking with colleagues from all over the world, they are still pretty stable. We have seen some erosion of the occupancy rates, but in our case, we are seeing around 30% occupancy rates, for July and August. This is a relatively good number, because we haven’t lost a lot of the bookings that we already had.

If you compare that with previous years, it’s a bad number, because we should be at a higher level by now, but if you consider that we are now five, six, seven weeks into the crisis, we haven’t seen a massive erosion just yet. It doesn’t mean that it won’t happen later; it might well do. But it hasn’t yet happened. This gives a ray of hope. If we look at Q4, we’re actually seeing positive pick up. Pick up is when we see new business and the cancellations, net net, there’s a pick up. That’s positive for Q4. We are seeing pretty good numbers for Mexico, we’re seeing numbers come back for the Canary Islands, which is an important destination for Europeans. By that standard, there should be some hope.

To your question, how long is it going to take, to regain pre-crisis levels? It will probably take 24 months, from the time that the virus is declared as being controlled. Either because there is a vaccine in place or because the authorities decide or announce that things are now under control and the epidemic is controlled. But I think it will take time to recover.

Another important aspect we need to look at is, how things have changed through time. Take 9/11. 9/11 has a massive impact on travel and tourism and for society, in general. It took a long time to recover from that tragic event. The different terrible attacks that we’ve seen happen, through time, in the last 20 years since then, society and travel, as an industry, has been able to recover faster and faster. It doesn’t mean that events are not tragic. A life is a life and terrorism is always a terrible thing to happen, but if we look at the Paris events, a few years back, which were massive attacks, hundreds of people killed in the streets, we saw Paris come back two, three, four weeks later. We’ve seen the same in Turkey. So terrorism, unfortunately, has become the new normal.