3 Steps to Recovery for the Travel & Hospitality Industry

Use your data to understand the traveler journey from beginning to end. Target each audience segment with contextually relevant messages that include details on cleaning procedures, hygiene, and social distancing so travelers feel secure. This is similar to how healthcare organizations build trust with patients and improve outcomes. There is education, prevention, screening, and other proactive steps that all occur before a patient enters a medical facility.

To mitigate anxiety around travel, it is crucial for brands to understand what travelers need in order to feel safe and clearly communicate policies. Use your app to show results of inspections, audits, and safety protocols. Indicate that rooms were clean and sanitized or that seats and tray tables were wiped down before boarding as well as information on air filtration, handling of blankets, and headsets.

Pro tip: There are many health benefits to travel. But before promoting a trip or encouraging people to see friends and family, weigh the current circumstances and government and CDC guidelines. Remain sensitive to the situation — and be flexible if you need to adapt your messaging.

Set up a community as a place for travelers to easily access support and answers to common questions. Your community can even become an interactive platform for travelers to communicate with one another. For corporate travelers and travel managers, be sure to provide visibility into contracts, vouchers, volumes, and overall agreements.

Salesforce built Work.com to help businesses adapt and transform during the health crisis. Use the workplace command center to make data-driven decisions on how to bring employees back to work safely. Have employees take regular wellness checks and assess their suitability to return to work. You can also tailor surveys and create workflows that trigger follow-up actions based on an employee’s wellness status.

Certain employees, like hotel personnel and flight crew, are returning to the workplace sooner than others. Back-office and traveler-support teams, on the other hand, may continue to remain in a remote work environment.

Wherever employees are located, it is important to ensure that they have what they need to do their jobs. Provide collaboration tools for employees to work together in real time, such as Quip for shared documents and spreadsheets. Launch an employee community to provide a virtual space for employees to gather, communicate, and learn.

As travel picks up, employees will need to learn how to treat travelers with empathy and help them understand new policies, precautions, and safety measures. You can also use the MyTrailhead platform to re-skill workers to support other teams, such as customer service. Create customized learning paths that teach them how to engage travelers with the right messaging, language, and approach. And get employees up to speed quickly on new procedures as the crisis evolves.

Transparency is key to reassuring employees that they work in a safe and healthy environment. Continuously demonstrate your commitment to their wellbeing. Regularly communicate that you are taking all necessary precautions for their health and safety. Provide wellness resources, including guided meditations, to help reduce stress and anxiety.

Consolidate your data across all systems into a single platform. This will create a “golden record,” or a 360-degree profile of your travelers. Everyone works off the same, up-to-date data to streamline the entire traveler experience with access to booking information, past transactions, preferences, travel history, and rewards status. You can also integrate third-party data from partners to create a traveler value score.

It’s one thing to know who your traveler is. It’s another to anticipate their needs and behaviors. Use artificial intelligence (AI) to gain insights about your travelers and receive recommendations on next steps. With a connected digital ecosystem, you can turn these insights into action by plugging them into your digital marketing platform for more targeted communications and help agents anticipate future traveler needs during a call.

With so many traveler inquiries, it’s inefficient for agents to toggle between multiple green screens and disparate systems. When you have a connected digital ecosystem, all traveler information shows up within a single service console, giving agents a single view for how to best assist travelers. Guided workflows walk them through different processes and automate routine, typically time-consuming tasks.

In the recovery phase, you’re sure to get a flurry of inquiries about safety and cancellation policies. Scale support across channels to get answers to travelers quickly. Use chatbots to address common requests. If a case requires a live agent, chatbots collect qualifying data so agents can jump right in to help within that same chat.

Use your help center as a resource for important content on policies and FAQs. You can also add a workflow to your traveler portal to walk them through simple tasks, like how to change and rebook a trip or report lost luggage.

Help business leaders make sense of your data and make smarter business decisions with intelligent dashboards. Analytics solutions like Datorama allow you to connect, unify, and centralize marketing data so that you can create “lookalike audiences” for better targeting and review campaign performance to get a better return on investment.