Sounding Off: There is no single metric for success right now (there are many)

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

"Some companies are more in pain and suffering than others," says hospitality guru and ex-Airbnb exec Chip Conley in the same speech as the metric reference noted above.

He's not wrong, obviously, but perhaps the industry is not going through such straightforward times as those when Conley says the success metric that his businesses used was market share.

There is currently no actual market to share - that's perhaps the most downbeat assessment that many might use.

But if where a business ranks alongside its competitors, even during a crisis such as now, is important, then so must be other factors.

Customer service is one, especially in a situation where thousands (maybe millions) of a company's travelers have been impacted, when they've required refunds or vouchers, perhaps need repatriation or, indeed, countless other forms of intervention.

Another could be product development. How has a company used its "downtime" to examine the code base for issues, or tighten up a particularly annoying bit of user experience that gets complaints but is never quite important enough to be addressed.

As others have mentioned, staff (re)training could be an massively important element that gets a brand out of the quagmire of a crisis, whether it's technical, business development, accounting or customer service.

These are just three practices that a company should evaluate itself on during such times, even if the measurement scales are difficult to determine.