COVID-20: Business Pandemic. Who will survive?

Travel comes back. After a period of being without income and suffering huge losses, plus the increase in spending over the new health and safety demands, playing by new rules do not favour profit. Those of us who managed to survive are emerging into the previously established world just to find out that it does not work the same any more.

In this new world, prices are dictated by the price level of the shared accommodation market. Home-sharing, a business that was totally prohibited during the coronavirus (unlike hotels) suffered tremendous lose. Those who survived are prepared to go a long way in the price war. It is needless to elaborate the effect this will have on hotel pricing.

Post-Corona guests are also not the same.  Three months of staying away from work means many are almost in the shoes of t poverty. Depleted savings and lost jobs, puts the need to feed families above travelling on their list of priorities.

No one can predict how long it will take to get back to “normal”. Thus, for many of us, it is still far from being over and many businesses may not survive. There is a good chance that the entire perception of  ”normality” will change. The world shows disturbing signs that climate change, racial unrests, and coronavirus will hardly be the last of the shakeups.

The internet, not only makes us smarter it also makes changes happen faster and, in many cases, they are not for the better. The availability of cheap accommodation through Airbnb not only allowed for more travel, it allowed the coronavirus to spread globally much easier. Thus, the near future might appear much less peaceful even in such a seemingly unshakable industry as hospitality. Hoping for the opposite will not be wise. A big rule of thumb for any business: if anything can go wrong- it definitely will.

It is not a ground-breaking discovery to state that in the time when all resources were consumed, the old ways do not work, and the future is far from being certain, survival can only be reached by the ability to adapt to new changes. In other words, if the old ways do not work, new ones need to be found in securing a profit.  In fact, it should have been done a long time before the coronavirus, but the industry got too comfortable with how things were. I guess there are no hoteliers who can remember the last time they created a listing of their hotel rooms on a new booking platform. Who needed it? Or when last did an hotelier listen until the end when a new supplier had an offer for your hotel. Who cared? Well, now is time to care. So, let’s start; better later than never.

In times when the global pandemic gets replaced by a business pandemic, it is hardly time for outlandish financial decisions but rather the very evident ones. You can increase your cash flow in the following ways:

• Not paying a service fee for online booking platforms
• Saving on the advertising of your hotel
• Selling more through the hotel’s website
• Getting fully booked
• Getting more competitive
• Charging higher prices wherever possible

There might be a few more, but the real question to ask will be: where else can I get all of the benefits?  That is a very good question indeed. There is a newcomer who offers exactly all of this:

• Lets you charge a higher price without risking becoming less competitive
• Allows you to sell more through your website
• Reduces your marketing spending
• Charges you almost no service fee.

This newcomer is Thegoldenmoon.com– the first online booking platform created by hosts, not web developers. Among others it promises to put the interest of hosts first, free the market from dependency, bringing universal choice to guests, giving more power to hosts, and fair pricing. Under the current economic circumstances, the “fair pricing” should be the best place to start.  Let’s have look what they have to offer. Find out more in our next article: Winning the Post-Corona: Understanding the Challenge.