Winter’s Coming

How Travelcard outfoxed the TRAVEL downturn

Early in 2020, whilst others were still watching the bushfires, the travel industry was attuned to the virus spreading out of Wuhan, China. Daily updates were required to ensure clients had up to date advice on how their insurance was affected. Should they cancel? Would they be covered if they got sick? How big would this get, and what would it cost?

At this time I was working with TravelCard helping them grow their operations, so as well as helping address the developing situation, we looked forward and suggested we put in place the ability for the entire operation including the call centre to work from home, just in case Sydney entered lock-down.

We bought laptops, deployed the appropriate systems, solved home connectivity issues, tested mass working from home and worked out how we’d manage and stay connected to people when we couldn’t see them.

At this point some thought this a folly, after all Australia was so far away from this, you could still fly to China, not to mention buy hand sanitiser, toilet roll and laptops.

Prepared, we watched the saga unfold.

As travel bans stiffened we realised all travel could stop for the foreseeable future. We’d have a lot of cancellation, postponement and claims work, but this would pass and then there would be nothing; no revenue, no work, only cost.

I dusted off my recession toolkit, which had sat on a bookshelf since 2009. the team quickly embraced the language of Surviving the Winter, ‘hibernation’ is easier language that ‘cutbacks’.

We followed the methodology and came up with a cunning plan, so cunning it was worthy of being a fox strategy.

The idea was simple - as the world locks down there was a good chance that those who had off-shored their services would be struggling, as the Philippines, India, South Africa and other countries entered lockdown. The business continuity plans dealt with lightning strikes and facility fires, but no one had contemplated global lockdown.

Two phone calls later we had a client, a general insurer.

A good portion of the TravelCard Operations team have different jobs for the crisis, lodging motor claims, allowing us to ensure everyone at TravelCard has a job.

It’s a great story, we have a new partner who we helped out of a tricky spot, and they’ve helped us save jobs. We’ve saved jobs, we’re recovering the cost, and we’re on the front foot.

Just like the fox we scavenged, feeding off whatever we could find to nourish ourselves through the lean months, there was a fair amount of courage and cunning involved too, and there were tears shed - it’ll go down as one of the prouder moments of the careers of many of those involved. Long live the fox!

“I would not hesitate in recommending Dave and his Surviving the Winter workshop to you and your business – a simple, focused and disciplined approach for gaining in tough times.” Peter Klemt, CEO TravelCard