Creativity and Cost Control – The Cocktail to Recovery
Since the end of March we’ve been running webinars with OAG, taking the temperature of an industry beaten down by the COVID19 pandemic and trying to make sense of what is happening around us. We’ve spoken to airlines, airports, consultants, industry data gurus, aviation lawyers and finance specialists and answered hundreds of questions from the industry about how we navigate through this crisis.
What strikes me more than anything is the optimism and positivity of the panellists we’ve had the pleasure of talking with, despite being in the middle of a crisis the like of which (good Scottish saying!) none of us have ever seen before and hope we will never see again. The resilience and strength of many of our industry’s leaders is evident though and now, perhaps more than ever, is the time where those leaders earn their stripes.
We need these leaders to be steadying the ship, keeping calm, lobbying government, pushing their teams to do things differently and creating a shared common goal to make travel accessible and affordable again. Based on our recent experiences and conversations, I am encouraged that we have many industry leaders with exactly these qualities and the passion that will be needed to drive our industry forward.
As is the case in so many different parts of our lives now, the way we did things pre-COVID will not be the way we do things during COVID and post COVID. Leaders, and businesses will need to be agile and flexible if they are to survive. The bottom line will be more important than ever. For those of us who have been around the block, confidence in our collective ability to do that comes from experience. But experience alone will not get us through this.
We find ourselves having to rethink many aspects of our industry – how do airline network planners cope with the ever changing international border requirements and put a commercially viable network on sale, how to do airport managers cope with new requirements around social distancing and all the associated implications that brings, and for the passenger, how destination managers convince travellers it is safe to visit again – I could go on! At the moment, the usual data sources appear to be of little value in predicting how recovery might happen, but in the next few months data will be become increasingly vital in taking the pulse of the recovery and when to adjust capacity.
We are already seeing airlines making brave and bold decisions about how they plan to recovery and it’s becoming clear that those with the best handle on costs and with the most flexible approach will be the most likely to survive.
What is clear is we will need creative ideas and a willingness to experiment to get through this – and for an industry governed by operating procedures and compliance - this will be uncomfortable. So let’s buckle up and get going!