Translating the Speed of Trust Concepts to Today’s Tourism Landscape Post COVID
It was Fall of 2019 when I listened to Stephen Covey’s book, Speed of Trust, while driving through Costa Rica from beach town to beach town. The concept that he laid out in the book has made its way into my life, not just professionally, but personally as well.
So, it’s no surprise that as the recovery and rebound phase from COVID-19 continued to prolong itself, that everyone in our professional network behind the International Tourism Resource Network was wondering “What can we collectively do to accelerate the industries return?” The whole idea in the first place was to unite professionals across the hospitality network and to share resources and information that would enhance onsite and regional policies, best practices and methods that would curb the learning curve for everyone with these shared resources. However, given that no one had a true sense of how long this pandemic was truly going to last or the implications of the stay at home orders, we weren’t able to prepare for the longevity of these closed doors.
One morning, while speaking with Trevor Stuart-Hill of Revenue Matters, it struck me that we could collaborate around this notion of consumer confidence and how it affects the recovery of tourism at large. Just as trust can be accelerated between two parties in business or relationships, equally consumer confidence had a correlation to how fast and when people were going to travel again. Trevor and I entertained several conversations about how in a normal economy things like consumer confidence, transparency and motivation were all factors that influence the likelihood of a prospective traveler going to a hotel or destinations.
We recognized that there was a strong correlation between all of these factors, regardless of the economic state that plays into the strength of tourism. Transparency and consistency are now just as important key factors in a consumer decision-making process as motivation and desire to travel. Lack of transparency, consistency and unity can have long term consequences for locally owned hotels and resorts. For example, if local media claims COVID-19 cases are ~500 in the area but the hotel claims there are only 200, potential consumers will lose trust and confidence. Policies such as new cleaning practices within hotels need to be commonly adopted across-the-board, similarly to how we are seeing in restaurants now. Visibility and transparency in these processes reinforces consumer confidence and increases the likelihood that they are going to stay with you.
While we took some liberty from Stephen Covey‘s, Speed of Trust, and modified a few of the components in this equation, we’ve tested the model before. Exploring regional issues like a hurricane or hot season, we’ve been able to see that this equation still holds true. As such, we take a deeper dive in this article to explore the change this new pandemic era and what we as influencers and experts in this industry can do to accelerate the recovery of the tourism industry as a whole. in this pandemic era what we as influencers and experts in the industry can do to accelerate the recovery for
Read the full-length article on HospitalityNet here.