Safety and hygiene protocols, essential after the lockdown won’t be enough, with responding to clients’ new needs being keyIn the Business Beyond Covid series, CEOs and other business leaders and experts in their sectors look to the future after Covid-19.
Conference venues that can offer spacious, well-ventilated meeting rooms will be the preferred choice. This greater focus on spacing may mean that economies of scale previously made possible by large crowds cannot be reached, making events slightly more costly to host. For example, is anyone actually going to want to touch a menu that’s been through who-knows-how-many hands before theirs? Our hotels have already started shifting away from menus in favour of guests being able to order room service on their own mobile phones. This means they can even order ahead of their arrival at the property, with the meal timed to arrive just after they’ve reached their suite.
However, beyond these operational trends my biggest fear is that the hotel sector will embark on a price war when hotels will have a stock surplus — particularly until inward-bound international travel is allowed. Even once travel is allowed there’s likely to be a period of resistance to travel locally and abroad as a result of financial constraints, international travel quarantine periods, and the now ingrained caution resulting from Covid-19.
I believe the government has handled this crisis very well to date — we had to lock down to gear up to battle the coronavirus and its consequences, but our borders and the economy need to open up for us to survive, and to stop price wars in the tourism sector. There are merits in this idea, but the truth is that the SA tourist industry depends significantly on inbound tourists for income, not least because the vast majority of our people simply cannot afford to travel for leisure, or within the kind of price range that makes a meaningful contribution to GDP.
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