Sounding Off: The travel industry must not be a turn-off for those with ideas

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered by PhocusWire that week.

Furloughs and then redundancies have hit eh travel, tourism and hospitality industry extremely hard over the course of the last 16 months.

Hospitality is said to be one of the hardest-hit sectors in the business, as hotels seek to reopen and bring back existing staff or recruit new teams to fill the gaps in their workforces. 

The situation speaks to a problem that the industry as a whole will face for many months and, perhaps more worryingly, further ahead.

The issues being experienced by hotels and other parts of the industry may be mirrored at a different level: those considering how to help shape the future of the industry with big ideas and cutting edge innovation.

The failure rate of travel startups was already high pre-pandemic, but given the fragility of the situation that the sector found itself last year and for the foreseeable future, many entrepreneurs may be put off from diving in.

The glittering lights that shine in the eyes of startup founders, eager to mimic the success of an Airbnb or Uber, have been dimmed somewhat during the COVID-19 crisis.

The inherent risky nature of forming a new business in travel has been given an additional challenge with the uncertainty of how the market will crawl its way out from the biggest battle to hit the sector in its history.

This is why the incumbents should now take a position and act on it.

Nurturing new ideas and attracting bright people to the sector, in spite of the issues that will be in place for some time, should be a challenge that those with the means to help must grasp.

It would be a disservice to the evolution of the industry in years to come if established brands, as they focus on recovery, didn't still take a chance on those with an entrepreneurial spirit or the accelerators/incubators that are attached to large players had mothballed their programs.