4 steps to adapting to the times

Angel Llull Mancas, Vice President and Managing Director – Asia Pacific, Booking.com, shares four key steps to adapting to the new reality so that business flourishes. From meeting a customer’s booking needs to understanding their desire to make the most of a work-cum-vacation, businesses have to get more innovative.

Nisha Verma

Sharing his take on how COVID-19 has drastically impacted the travel industry, Angel Llull Mancas shares that people in APAC are willing to travel domestically and closer home. However, he feels that recovery is going to take years.For him, there are four key steps to adapting to the new reality.

Instil trust

“The first point is how to instil trust in the minds of our travellers. If we can do that, travel can be where it belongs— as a fundamental part of our lives,” shares Mancas. “At the end of the day, they want to feel safe when they travel and understand the hygiene protocols and health measures that our partners are taking. As an industry, we have to make sure that we create that content and that information, and this is what we are doing on our platform – we are adapting to that type and the level of granularity in those topics, not only in the content but also how they can search and filter for different properties,” he claims.

Make procedures flexible

The second factor of this new reality is being flexible to customers, says Mancas. “We are living in an uncertain environment. A traveller might plan a trip and they might have to change on the go and the reason could be that you cannot predict when a second wave of COVID will hit and how the borders react. Hence, they want to have the peace of mind that if they want to cancel, they can. That’s why it’s important that we adapt our product to that mindset, offering flexible cancellations while making sure that we can adapt to the new booking windows,” he shares.

Adapt to trends

According to Mancas, the third step in the process is adapting to and following the new behaviours of travellers.

“What we have seen is that due to COVID, people are looking for areas and locations to go that are going to be less populated, to enjoy nature and to relax. This is the reason we have innovated our search function to make it more intuitive and inspirational. We have created a think carousel where we can showcase those locations to adapt to the needs of our customers, while creating more visibility for the partners we have in those destinations,” he says.

Meet new customer needs

The fourth and last factor of this reality is that COVID has created a new type of customer, says Mancas, adding, “Working remotely is the new reality. There are digital nomads that don’t want to necessarily work from home and are ready to travel and work remotely from any location. All they need is for the place to be laptop-friendly, have Wi-Fi, and blend with leisure. They want to find a location they can work from while they enjoy. It is going to
happen in the years to come,” he believes.