Post-pandemic Travel needs

While people will always want to vacation in far-off lands or visit new cities for business trips, the new normal of social distancing will result in many travellers developing a profound and lasting stigma against widely shared spaces including hotel lobbies, packed restaurants, communal office setups and even guest rooms in properties with high turnover.

In the short term, this favours properties of the following characters:

1.     Small or boutique hotels of roughly 75 rooms or less, where the lack of size naturally inscribes fewer human interactions and less crowded spaces

2.     Rural properties within a comfortable driving distance from a major urban centre so they can capitalize upon the staycation renaissance

3.     Resorts where there is a strong feeling of remoteness and less direct contact with the outside world, especially properties that have a natural geographic barrier to provide isolation from neighbors

4.     Cabin-style properties that encompass a collection of fully detached buildings rather than a single structure where guest rooms abut one another

5.     Hotels with large, open restaurants (or other trafficked outlets) where management can afford to remove some tables and increase the gap between dining groups

6.     Home-sharing platforms where the prospect of staying in an apartment or house implies more separation from others due to the lack of contact with staff or other guests

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Travel post Covid-19

Here’s how people will travel after the coronavirus:

  1. They’ll stay in the country. International travel will fall out of favour as people stay closer to the safety of home. 
  2. They won’t travel far from home. “Staycations” and road trips will be favoured over flying or cruising.
  3. They’ll make it quick. A softer economy will mean the traditional two-week summer vacation could turn into a long weekend.

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Tips for Hospitality Sales Persons post Covid-19

1. Work on building relationships with organizations. When the outbreak has lessened and customers are considering rebooking, they are going to remember how you treated them. Focus first on maintaining relationships and then on prospecting in the future rather than trying to do any hard sells. Check in on customers to see how they are doing and find out what specifically they need. Focus on what we can control right now. What we can control is having conversations with customers and getting their feedback by asking the right, quality questions.

2. Be aware of new and current opportunities. Airline fares are extremely low right now and people are still taking advantage of that. If you recollect, after 9/11, leisure travel was one of the first segments to come back. People are stressed and they need to get out there and blow off a little steam.

3. Businesses are going to change the way they operate. This is going to be a completely new world that our sales organizations are going to be facing. Some may be naive and say that the virus is gone and it is business as normal, however it’s not going to be business as normal. You are going to have to rearrange your whole sales strategies, your staffing levels, and your business mixes to really recover what you can on the back end of this. As more people are working remotely, it is possible that business travel may decrease, possibly even permanently, but because this crisis has taught us to work more efficiently from a distance, there may be more of a need for us to convene in person at conferences in the future. The possibility of renting out boardroom suites to employees who need a place to focus on their remote work instead of working from home may emerge. Hotel rooms may have to become adaptable to conversion to such needs.

4. We’re in uncharted territory. Some people are predicting that the coronavirus will affect the industry for just a few months, while others have heard that it could last up to a year. This is something different than anything the industry has faced before. It is quickly becoming apparent that this is less SARS and a lot more 9/11 in how it feels. People are scared to fly or they are being restricted to fly. So that’s a different set of changes in demand and hotels will have to deal with that.

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Confused travellers seek definitive answers

In these uncertain times, it is becoming likely that travellers will desire more direct communication from online travel agencies (OTAs) soon.

According to GlobalData, 44% of global travellers typically booked with an OTA in 2019, whilst only 17% would consider using an in-store travel agency.

However, recent events, including the demise of Thomas Cook, Brexit uncertainty and now Covid-19, have raised concerns regarding the reliability of an OTA in terms of direct communication.

Confused travellers seek definitive answers

Upon discovering holiday plans will no longer take place amid global travel restrictions and mass flight cancellations, travellers seek advice from the platform they booked with.

The majority of travel companies that offered direct bookings are now allowing travellers to change or cancel reservations without any additional fees. However, if a consumer has used a third-party agent, it can make the cancellation process drawn out and complicated.

With Expedia, bookings with an array of airlines cannot be adjusted or cancelled through the platform itself. For some bookings, travellers will have to contact the airline to make changes. Booking.com has introduced ‘forced circumstances’, expecting companies to refund prepayments and waive any cancellation costs for travellers that have pre-booked. This may end in disputes regarding liability, leaving the customer in the dark for longer.

At times like this, travellers will seek more direct communication and definitive answers regarding holiday plans. If they had booked directly with a package provider or flight operator, the communication process between agent and consumer may have been more streamlined.

A personalised approach remains integral, as well as direct communication

Personalisation is a key theme driving the future of travel services. According to a recent GlobalData survey, 89% of global travellers are now ‘always, ‘often’ or ‘somewhat’ influenced by how well a product or service is tailored to their needs and personality.

Online travel giants, such as Expedia and Booking Holdings, are at an advantage with this theme as data and personalisation go hand in hand. With access to a large number of customer records, OTAs can offer personalised experiences tailored to each specific traveller.

In a post-Covid-19 world, however, one to one communication could become of greater importance, working in the favour of more traditional travel agencies.

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AirBnb’s Financial Drain

Airbnb is losing money at the speed or light and that will only get worse over the coming months. What is the financial future of Airbnb?

Airbnb allows renting of a room online. It’s a very simple platform to connect prospective travellers with room owners. Airbnb’s entire value resides in being an escrow. They provide a layer of trust and handle payments.

For this simple activity of listing rooms and holding transactional payments, Airbnb takes a fee from 20% – 30% of the booking.

As a traveller, you want to have Airbnb as a middleman every single time as you do not want to send cash directly to a stranger in advance.

As a room owner, you want to have Airbnb as middleman as they give you a minimal guarantee and somebody to sue if the property is damaged after the guest leaves.

The two closest businesses are hotels.com and booking.com. They are similar to Airbnb though they rent hotel rooms instead of private rooms. Booking hotels through hotels.com and booking.com makes sense, more so when it comes to business travel or for large hotel chains with customer accounts. These platforms have a bit more focus on searchability, ratings and a seamless booking experience that Airbnb or even regular hotel sites do not have.

As Airbnb grows and gather more and more customers, hotels will start listing on Airbnb and Airbnb will then have to adjust its experience to cater to hotels.

On the revenue front, Airbnb makes US$ 3 billion per annum while hotels.com and booking.com each make up to four times this revenue.

Commission is 20-30% per booking. A bit less sometimes for hotels due to (large) deals with (large) hotel chains. Pretty much all of it is operating margin. It’s a tech company, a simple website. There are no costs like real estate or machinery or physical goods or storage or shipping. It’s all profit hence they’re all very profitable business. More importantly, while hotels.com  employs only 500 employees, Airbnb employs 15000 employees – a single company running a single website!

Airbnb’s strategy has been to burn as much VC cash as possible and hire as many employees as possible – A standard strategy to inflate valuation and raise even more money. Remember as a thumb rule, every dollar of VC funding you use now, you will get five in the next round. The fact is, there is nothing for these 15k people to do. Experts say that Airbnb could operate just as well (probably better actually) with a third of that, or go lean with as little as one tenth if the situation required it.

The coronavirus has cut Airbnb revenues in half. It’s unknown how long it will last but could be years. Airbnb will be haemorrhaging money at an unprecedented rate. Their fixed costs are simply too high. Airbnb will have to cut the fat sooner or later. Meanwhile middle level employees are reportedly being hired with offers in excess of $400k. It’s going to be a rough awakening for employees. Forget about any bonus. Half of the offers were imaginary money in illiquid shares. It’s hard to estimate what shares might be worth at this stage if anything, without knowing the fine print. They’re likely to never materialize, between VC shenanigans against common employee shares, probable lay-offs soon and any prospect of IPOing in the coming years down the drain.

Twitter used to have 4000 employees many years ago. Most of which were doing nothing and notably self-reporting to be playing Ping-Pong in the office waiting to cash on their shares… a typical case of a company inflating headcount to inflate a future IPO, which of course the market didn’t buy. They had to reduce expenses in the following years while increasing revenues. The headcount was frozen for years and it’s hardly bigger now than it was back then.

Rest assured. Airbnb is a solid business that is at no risk of disappearing. They are burning money for the sake of VC growth and valuation. Can they afford to employ evermore thousands of people for up to a half a million dollars each? Expect a reality check as most unicorns playing the VC game get sooner or later.

What if Airbnb were to run out of cash? It’s not a problem because they will be able to get more very easily. The business is extremely solid and sustainable as explained. The brand is strong and well established worldwide.

The only downside is unbelievably high fixed-costs (workforce) in the face of all travel revenues grinding to a halt from the coronavirus. This means a couple of bad years to go through, easily withstandable with cash reserves, debts and cost reductions, in some combination thereof.

There are hundreds of billions in cash sitting idle in the world with nowhere to invest in. Equities are crashing. Bonds have near zero returns. Cash has negative interest.

Airbnb needing few billion dollars in cash is a godsend for an investor on a 5-10 years horizon. It is ripe for an hostile takeover from a Vulture Venture Capitalist. Get as much control as possible, lay off one third of the company, freeze headcount for 2-3 years. It will be printing money soon enough. Alternatively, it could be financed by debt. Banks like Softbank, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs can arrange corporate loans in that order of magnitude. They do that regularly when financing factories for the oil or car industry for example. Banks are less invasive about how the company is run and don’t try to take it over.

The future of Airbnb depends on how greedy VC and owners are really (normally they are always ruthless by nature). If Airbnb still has billions in cash from their last funding, the company can withstand a bad year or two doing nothing. If not, the company might re-raise money from a VC and it’s likely to impose strong terms to cut the workforce. Either way, the board might self-seize the opportunity to cut the workforce by one third anytime. Lower running costs, no loss of productivity raises a better outlook both in the short and long term.

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