Companies that can survive the current crisis without "sacrificing their future" will emerge stronger.
While many companies will have spent the past six months somewhere between firefighting or going into hibernation, others have decided to continue investing in their strategy.
Tao Tao, co-founder and chief operating officer of GetYourGuide, says the company took a number of decisions to protect the company and staff early on but also decided to continue to be "customer-oriented."
“It’s easy when things are good but much harder when things are not looking so good. We made a commitment to say we should remain customer obsessed because these are the customers that will fund recovery.”
Speaking at this week’s WebInTravel Zero.0 virtual event, he says the company also decided to continue investing in key initiatives that would make it stronger in the knowledge that the pandemic would not last forever.
“We did not want to give up on the future. The technology and product teams are working tirelessly on digital product. That is how you delight customers and that will make customers come back," Tao says
Part of the strategy is to somehow keep customers in the GetYourGuide ecosystem.
The company has been outspoken in media in recent months about anger over anti-competitive behavior from Google.
Tao says while Google is part of the equation in its growth plans for the future, it is looking at how, it can invest in its product, app, CRM systems and offering to “give customers reasons to come back to us and be a little less dependent on how we acquire customers on all kinds of channels.”
He also talks about companies being more digital going forward and needing to add "real value."
“What I mean is that in the past 10 years things were going well and a lot of businesses made profits off legacy, opaque markets - investor funding instead of customer funding. Corona has had a massive cleansing effect.”
He adds that while GetYourGuide itself has been well-funded and used different acquisition channels, it is the customers that are the “main source of funding and will fund the recovery in the best way.”