#YouthMonth: Covid fork in the road means a change in direction for Travel Tractions

Matt Davison, founder of Travel Tractions

How has Covid-19 impacted on your business and the economy?

The Covid pandemic has had a devastating impact on the organisation, within one week, from around 12 May,we had 95% of our clients pause or cancel contracts. The effect on the economy is still to be seen, but I believe it will be more than a 5% decrease to our GDP this year.

Comment on the challenges and opportunities

Our challenge was that there was no one really interested in spending money on travel marketing related services in this uncertain time. In many ways, travel came to an abrupt standstill. We’re quite lucky to have a couple of other clients outside of travel and took this time to change our focus and put a face on a more general agency, hence The Marketing Mill was born. Travel Tractions will continue to operate at full capacity, ensuring that the travel industry has resources despite the decline. The Marketing Mill will run alongside the current company, offering services such as SEO strategy, content creation, link building and web design.

How is your organisation responding to the crisis?

We reacted fast. As the owner I haven't taken a salary for the last couple of months, the team has temporarily decreased their salaries by a percentage, of which UIF is mostly subsidsing and we have reduced a lot of our operating costs. Essentially we were able to cut our monthly costs to almost half of what they were and have been able to keep everyone employed and extend our runway for another six months. We also launched a new agency and used the weak rand exchange rate to offer a 25% discount on all our services to international clients, bringing in an influx of old client work and some new clients.

How has the lockdown affected your staff?

Not that much, we were always very pro working remotely so the team adjusted quickly, we have reduced salaries but have implemented a “family fund” to help those in need and put away money for part of the team that may run into financial problems in the future. If anything, this has brought us a lot closer. The team does Zoom parties doing yoga and all sorts, although there have been some challenges in being locked up and I can tell that some people's mental health is taking strain. We have been very flexible with their time and encourage people to switch off and separate their workspace from their living space as mental health during this time is also a priority.

How are you navigating ‘physical distancing’ while keeping your team close-knit and aligned and your clients happy?

Ha, personally I’m a homebody and wasn't a big fan of driving to face-to-face meetings so it’s gone really well in that sense. Our clients are happy meeting remotely and the team does a lot of Hangout calls with each other. We also have more weekly workshops, which have made us more tight-knit because for once we all are in the same country and timezone, so everyone is kinda online at the same time, which is really nice. We’ve also started making use of our “water cooler” slack channel which brings about plenty of laughs and stories.

What measures have you put in place for its employees?

We allocated a family fund and have implemented monthly check-ups to find out how everyone is going mentally and financially. We’ve also been very transparent and give regular updates on the financial situation of the company once a week. As a team, we have set goals to achieve to try to get everyone back to 100% salary as soon as we can.

What are you busy working on? Any initiatives/campaigns relating to the coronavirus?

Right now we are working on quite a few campaigns.In the past week, we have created content and strategies marketing cat-centric products, knives, CBD oil, cannabis, insurance, wine and all sorts. We are not working on any big travel campaigns to deal with the virus as of right now as it's hard to say when tourism will be back, but it’s really nice to see our wine and cannabis clients do exceptionally well in this time.

Has this global crisis changed your view of the future of the tourism and travel industry in any way? Any opportunities you think will emerge as a result?

Big time! To be honest, I don't think travel will be the same for years. There is going to be a new way of how we travel and no one really knows what that will look like.

I just hope that some of our clients are going to make it out of this so we can work with them again. There are some travel companies investing big time in SEO right now because when travel does resume it will be a far less competitive market and those that are positioned correctly are going to have really great returns.

Any trends you’ve seen emerge as a result of the crisis?

Yeah, virtual tourism is all the rage right now. We’ve had a couple of enquiries about this and digital travel is changing forever. People are consuming way more travel video content and we are so excited to see that shift.

Your key message to those in the tourism sector during this time?

Don’t be idle. It may be uncertain at the moment, but travel will resume eventually and when it does, be ready. Make sure your messaging is on point (address the corona concerns head-on) and now is a really great time to focus on the digital presence of your company or tourism. It’s great to see products being refined and made better, and we have a lot of time to perfect things that may not have had the time or have been a priority the last couple of years.

What do you predict the next six months will be like?

Ha, rocky, uncertain. I don't think anyone knows what the next six months of this is going to look like, at the moment we are taking it one week at a time.