Covid and Beyond

I am one of the few people who was fortunate enough to travel throughout the Covid pandemic and as soon as the airspace opened, I looked for opportunities to travel. Not because I wasn’t afraid but because travel is my business, it’s in my blood and the thought of being grounded by fear was more constraining to me than the thought of contracting the virus (which incidentally I have – twice now). During my travels I have been able to see firsthand how different countries have handled the pandemic, the effects it has had on different communities and the changes in attitudes and behaviors over the last 2 years.

My first flight was to the UK in October 2020 and at that time I have to frankly say that the UK had zero control, I had to complete a passenger locator form and I was supposed to isolate for 10 days. Although I did this, no-one checked on me and I am certain that had I broken the isolation rules no one would’ve known. Whilst the border controls were strict, and the border police were doing an excellent job of checking and double checking where I had been and what tests I had done etc. once I got past that stage there was no follow up. I traveled back to the UK in January 2021 and things had changed. This time for various reasons I was stuck for 6 months, and things were tighter, the pandemic had gotten out of control and there were regular checks on my whereabouts. In the middle of this 6 months, I managed to get back to Dubai for a week but in order to get back to the UK I had to go and spend 10 days in Sudan since Dubai was on the red list for the UK, but Sudan wasn’t for some strange reason. In Sudan, it was almost as if there was no such thing as Covid, social distancing didn’t exist and people went about their normal daily business, this clearly shows that the UK rules at that time were a bit skewed, believe me, Sudan was rife with Covid at the time but since statistics showed something different then it was ok to visit the UK. Once I managed to get back to Dubai in July, it was time to take a holiday and after such a torrid time I decided to visit some of the tribes in East Ethiopia. My visit to the Mursi Tribe (you will know them as the tribe where the women have a large plate in their lower lips) made me realize that there was an unseen effect of covid that I had not considered. The lack of tourism which was no doubt driven by the countless National Geographic documentaries and articles had resulted in a considerable reduction in revenue to these tribes. They were no longer able to sell their wares to tourists and the showcase of their culture had historically resulted in considerable revenue to support their way of life and the growth of their community. Whilst they were of course self-sufficient, it was an eye opener to see how the pandemic had affected areas which none of us have ever really considered.

As border rules have been relaxed and the world has opened up again I have been traveling more extensively and the more I travel the more I see the lasting effects of the pandemic which will take quite some time to get over.

Most importantly, anyone in our industry today is happy to see visitors back in their hotels and airplanes but everyone I meet complains of the same issue, Staffing!!! It is proving extremely difficult to resource our businesses with effectively skilled and experienced people in order to match the consumer demand and retain the levels of service expected. Why is this?

1????????????????????Our industry was possibly the worst affected by covid and some organizations were quite frankly brutal in their policies and approach to downsizing.

2????????????????????Those that lost their jobs had to retrain and, in some cases, move into more stable industries, these individuals are likely lost to us forever.

3????????????????????Those that kept their jobs went through a period which was unproductive, disheartening, demotivating and probably left them seriously considering changes.

Now we are asking these people to return to who they were before as if nothing had happened, it’s like asking a partner to be the same person after you have cheated on them, clearly this will never happen. So, the question is, as business leaders, how do we manage this situation? I speak for myself when I say that anyone of my team could’ve left our business, they are all extremely capable and would’ve thrived wherever they moved to, I was just blessed that they remained loyal, and we are now rebuilding our business around them. Not every company was as lucky. Most companies are now screaming out for skills and struggling to fill vacancies in order to cope with the demand of revenge travel. In my personal opinion this is what we have to do as an industry:

1????????????????????We have to bring the passion back! Anyone who works in tourism has to be passionate, so we need to make our industry exciting again. Today, most people would see working in tourism as a risk and that issue needs to be resolved.

2????????????????????We have to offer assurances to our employees, in the end business is business and of course job losses in the industry were inevitable. In hindsight perhaps we could’ve restructured our businesses to ensure we kept the skilled personnel who would be more difficult to recruit. Even offering them lesser jobs until the pandemic was over, better to have a lesser job than no job at all.

3????????????????????We have to start from the bottom up, recruiting fresh graduates, implementing rigorous training programs, and getting the industry back to where we need it to be.

All of this will take time but we need to make sure that we don’t just fall back to where we were pre-pandemic, we learn from this and we build a more robust stable industry with failsafe’s in place to weather future storms.