During its darkest days in the eye of the storm,
Trip.com found itself handling “tens of thousands” of domestic flights and
hotels cancellations a day. Thankfully, Yudong Tan, CTO and vice president,
flight business, who describes that time as “really bad,” says the group had
invested heavily in automation and so was able to handle 95% of cancellations
automatically.
“That was very smooth,” Tan says.
However, in February, cancellations came in for
the international markets and even though it had also invested in automation,
only 50 to 60% of cancellations could be handled automatically “due to other
issues."
Tan says that created a huge backlog of
international queries, which took more than a month to clear. While handling
that backlog, it nevertheless invested more engineering resources to handling
the international sector so that, by the end of February, the automation rate
of cancellations was around 70 to 80%.
Thus, when the second wave of cancellations came
in from international markets around mid-March, it was in a better position to
cope compared with January and February, relates Tan.
Traveloka experienced a similar problem. Saying
Indonesia is “in the early stages” of COVID-19, Caesar Indra, CEO, Traveloka Transport,
says it first felt the impact in Thailand when it saw declines in travel and
experiences bookings and massive spike in cancellations and refunds requests in
February.
Then in March, things went downhill when
Indonesia reported the first coronavirus case. “We saw a massive refund request
to our customer care centers, 10 times the usual volume,” he says.
Again, because the majority of its business was
domestic, it was able to handle this through automation. However, when it came
to international flights, Indra says, “There is a gap and it’s highly dependent
on multiple partners – the GDS, ATPCO and airlines – and it’s hard to be
automated.”
Indra says the challenge is the lack of standardization
in refund policies and “some are submitted by free text which is readable by
agents but not as easy to be automated.”
“If we can, as an industry, agree on a certain
protocol in refund and scheduling policies and have all the airlines commit to
it, it would be much easier to be automated and improve efficiencies across the
value chain,” he says.
Tan agrees, saying that although there was
already protocol defined by ATPCO, “not all airlines fully comply and not all
airlines move at the same pace. There are also low-cost carriers which are not
subscribed to ATPCO. To resolve this, every party in the industry – GDS, travel
agents, airlines – needs to work together to solve the problem.”
A true stress test of
customer care
The crisis also challenged the traditional call center
model. When “social distancing” guidelines enforced by local governments
prevented its staff from going to the site in the Philippines, Indra confesses,
“It was a bit of a shock.”
However, based on what it had seen happen in
China – Trip.com also moved its 15,000 employees in its call centers in China
to remote work during lock down – it “immediately prepared all infrastructure
for call center agents to be able to work remotely.”
“This is a great difference from the traditional
call center model,” Indra says.
He described the situation as “a true stress
test of customer care” – when you get a sudden spike in cancellations of
bookings accumulated over a few months compressed into a few days.
While he believes the human touch is important
in managing emotions, this crisis has shown how important technology is at the
back end. “We were already building a tech solution to scale up the back end
and COVID-19 has accelerated the program and investment in this area,” Indra
says.
“It is important for us and other OTAs to have a
tech back office operation which is equally as important as bookings. The most
important thing is, the customer must get their money back.”
He says COVID-19 presented, “an exponential
problem that cannot be solved with a linear approach.”
Jane Lim, VP, APAC Strategy & Operations,
Tripadvisor comments, “You need the human touch, but you need technology to
enable it at scale… this crisis has brought out the fact that people need to
support people, but you need to invest in product and technology to people
supporting people.”
Tan says the key lesson learned from COVID-19 is,
“We need to invest more in technology to smoothen the customer experience
especially when you are faced with massive requests.”
Taking steps for
recovery
Another question COVID-19 has raised for Tan is,
how can travel companies adapt better to the digital world?
“If you look at the mobile apps in China and you
see which ones have become more popular the past two months, they are pure
online apps – online games, online shopping, food delivery. If you can serve
your clients without a need to reach out in person, that business can survive,”
he says.
Technology can also play a role in spurring
recovery. Drawing on her experience working with e-commerce site, Shopee, Lim says
the power of an online community can be used to connect a community of sellers,
to source help and support across the industry.
For example, Tripadvisor is working on seeding
forums to provide greater assistance, as well as looking at one-on-one
consultations with impacted travel businesses on how they can develop their
product and prepare themselves for the rebound.
On the recovery front, Tan says it is working on
several initiatives to nurture the green shoots it is seeing in the Chinese
domestic market. Pre-sale hotel products are selling well, it is looking at
cross-selling between flights and hotels and it is testing out new marketing
channels such as Duoyin (Chinese version of TikTok) and WeChat with chairman
James Liang himself as the spokesperson.
For Traveloka, Indra says that given it was
still in the early stages of the crisis, “It is extremely important to assist
the customer during this difficult period. It’s taken a toll on their emotions
and we believe the way to stay engaged is to do whatever we can to handle
cancellations or rescheduling. It sounds basic but it means a lot to them.”
Traveloka is also fortunate in that it sells
other products beyond travel. Its financial services, rolled out in 2018, have
become very relevant to customers during the Stay-Home period, where people are
paying their bills over the app as well as buying more mobile data plans. Pay
Later, its digital/offline credit card, is also seeing good transactions. “We
will continue to invest and accelerate these services,” he says.
On whether product or price will lead the way
towards recovery, Indra believes that “there will be a need to incentivize
demand and it is unlikely suppliers will jack up prices. We will go into demand
recovery, which will lead to lower prices.”
Collaboration needed for
all players to emerge stronger
Overall, the crisis calls for an industry
collaborative effort to identify and ameliorate weaknesses across the value
chain. COVID-19 has forced companies to ask questions about how they must
design their products for the future.
Says Indra, “COVID-19 is a traumatic event to
businesses and consumers and there are some side effects that will stick
around… consumers will become more aware of hygiene and more information will
be required of all products, and it’s up to us to integrate all that
information [on our platforms]. There will also be more considerations around
flexibility – which was previously taken for granted – it may become an
important criteria as customers become more sensitive to [booking policies].”
Referring to the 100% Refund Guarantee product
it started selling in fourth quarter 2019, he says such a product will become
even more popular.
Tan adds that reliability will also become
critical in how consumers assess travel products, whether in flights, hotels or
experiences. He argues that the need for clearer policies, better service
quality and overall customer experience must be the top priority, which could
only truly be achieved through better collaboration between all players in the
value chain.
Indeed, when asked about who would emerge
stronger – global or regional OTAs or supplier direct – Indra says, “I don’t
think a single player can come out of this stronger without the collaboration
of the others in the value chain.”
* This
article originally appeared on WebinTravel.