After ITB cancelled, digital transformation mindset will help tourism industry to act DIFFERENTLY, can you see the opportunity behind the risk?

10 days ago, I landed back to Madrid, that time China was having the COVID-19 outbreak, while everyone is asking what are we gonna do? We just proudly launched our first CSR Campaign #WeSupportChina2020 in Europe and China promoting cultural respect, business ethic and empathy is key now. Credit to our donors, we successfully raised over EUR3500 from our B2B partners & investors' network to support China Coronavirus outbreak. 80% of the money we collected will donate to our charity partner by March 15 in Shanghai for supporting the medical equipment needs for Wuhan, China. Our donor support us a lot, thus we are trying our best to digitally promote them in our social media and make all the Chinese fans to remember them as an ethical and great businesses owners from the globe. Meanwhile we are happy to collect 100+ high quality pictures from our social campaigns in China to support our VOICE of the campaign.

Tourism industry, one of the biggest industries from the world with $5.7 trillion in revenue responsible for 319 millions jobs around the world seems suddenly facing a big cricis while the rapid spread of the COVID-19 in the globe. Economist forecast there will be big drop of business travel due to cancelations of events offline, traditional trade marketing seems will not be the perfect way to make business as one of the world famous travel trade event ITB Berlin had been just canceled. Leisure travel also had been affected due to Chinese are temporary being limited to travel around as China outbound tourism market is one of the biggest in the world, from the latest article from JP Morgan, It seems the effects will last for a while. 

Time for traditional tourism businesses to transform – "DIGITALISATION" IS THE KEY WORD, but HOW?

As a travel startup, we are quite optimistic about the challenges while major media are quite pessimistic. During this special timing, it requires a lot of creativities and fast actions to make changes and adjust the GO-TO-MARKET strategy for everyone. There are few insight I would love to share and may be it is beneficial to you. 

Insight 1: During the outbreak, Chinese millennials double the time using SOCIAL MEDIA, the CLOUD-ERA is coming to the globe, your target consumers' behaviour is changing. Are you ready?

From my last article I talked about, people actually staying home for the government policy, and they spent over 8-10 hours per day to work remotely, kill time with online video platform, online education and shop online. People changed their behavior from offline to online. In China, some GYM provides cloud-fitness service to enable people to keep track of their exercise at home. Some nightclubs launched cloud clubbing where people can watch live DJ sets and send in messages to give them the feeling that they're in a club on TIKTOK.

Insight 2: The more lifestyle content brands generated during this timing can link to good awareness building for brands.

Talking about psychology, people are looking for something fun and relax during the serious situation. In China, the research shows that Weibo and WeChat and little redbook are the major channels for people getting content and practical information during the outbreak. Video Content are the most popular choice and the DAU growth more than 2000% during the period. Travel is a very good topic for lifestyle, so maybe the tourism industry can leverage this timing to create some good videos for CLOUD-TRAVEL content. It is very interesting on how brands can leverage this period to maximising the brand exposure digitally.

Insight 3: High-income (monthly income more than RMB30,000+) which from the 1st-tier and 2nd-tier cities aged under 30s are more tend to travel overseas after the outbreak from China. 

For the latest consumer report from China iResearch published Feb-2020, it shows that the outbounds tourism market will slowly recover after the outbreak finished in 1-3 months. When people are ready to travel again, where will they go probably link to what inspire them during the outbreak time, so if brands/tourism industry steakholder can push some intersting campaign it will be good to increase their interest to bookmark it for their future travel decision. Another interesting figure from this report is mentioning that the psycological demands after the outbreak for outbound tourism. The report shows that wealthy people are more driven to travel abaord after the outbreak, and millenials under 30 years old from first and second tier cities seems could be the major groups of travlers to seek the cultural value of a destinations too. If the cultural destinations can make proper marketing campaigns to capture those TA, I think it would be a good change to generate good business in long run. 

Conclusion - Stay Calm and Keep Innovating!

When everyone is talking about the issue and I would suggest we don't be too much focus on the issue itself as we are not doctors or any medical professionals. As an entrepreneur if we are able to seek the opportunity behind the risk, react to the market FAST and make SMART actions, it will definitely brings us long term benefit. Lastly, if you are interested to collaborate with a CLOUD-TRAVEL videos project with us, welcome to send email to [email protected] for details. Think POSITIVE and Think FORWARD! Let's grab the chances and inspire the youth by our creativities and if you also want to tap into the millennials travel market opportunity, also welcome to enquiry for our service and product offering! If you like the article, welcome to share! I appreciated it.

Moreover, our new APP 2.0 version is going to launch in 15 days! Hope can continue create meaningful content to inspire Chinese across the globe to travel in the cloud and in the real life!

If you want to be part of our selected spot partners, subscribe here : https://www.shaketowin.net/stw-form/index.html

Source from: 

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/29/business/travel-industry-coronavirus-economic-impact/index.html

https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/research/coronavirus-impact

https://www.ft.com/content/60f9e2ec-dd39-31cc-86d9-1adaa4dde1f8

https://language.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202002/28/WS5e58a78ca31012821727b137.html

https://www.woshipm.com/it/3440121.html