When will travel recover – and are you ready?

When will travel recover? Will it be later this year or will we have to wait until 2022 to see higher volumes? Nobody knows for sure – but we do know it will happen.

When recovery comes, it’s likely to vary by region. Multiple factors – from the economic viability of social distancing to the effectiveness of vaccine rollouts – will have a big influence.

Here are three things we believe are certain:

1. Travel will come back – the pent-up demand is huge
2. It won’t look the same as it did before the pandemic
3. The travel sector’s comeback story will be digital.

Are you ready to create your own comeback story?

For travel companies operating with multiple legacy IT systems and manual processes, this Covid-19 downtime is a window of opportunity to upgrade. When customers return to travel, they’ll have new demands. After a year at home many will want to make up for lost time with a bucket-list trip; others will have reflected on their impact on the world and be more determined to factor environmental issues into their travel plans.

Forward-looking travel companies are adapting and investing now to ensure they stay competitive. They are being decisive and digitizing their businesses at speed. With modern, integrated travel management systems they can upscale quickly and offer new digital customer services such as:

• Travel sustainability calculators
• Covid-19 travel protocols
• Flexible itinerary management
• Supplier optimization tools to give customers the best deals.

Some of these services may have been seen as niche before the pandemic. Now, they will be expected and essential. To offer them in a financially viable way, travel companies will need to accelerate their own journey to connected data-sharing systems – otherwise it’s going to involve lots of manual work.

Interested to see how this might work in practice? Check out our customer success stories.