The Crisis Pivot: Lessons Learned in Travel Commercial Strategy 📉➡️📈

In my two decades in the travel industry, I've seen the market shift dramatically—from global economic tremors and natural disasters to unprecedented industry shutdowns. If my time in Operations taught me the value of detail, my years in Commercial Strategy taught me the necessity of the pivot.

A crisis is a commercial stress test. It’s not just about managing losses; it’s about making immediate, decisive changes to your core commercial levers: pricing, inventory, and cancellation policies. Strategy based on historic trends becomes instantly obsolete. Success belongs to the swift, the data-driven, and the empathetic.

1. Pricing: Replacing Intuition with Granular Data

In a crisis, panic often drives pricing decisions, leading to either desperate price cuts or a frozen fear of moving at all. Neither is sustainable.

• The Freeze vs. The Flood: When demand suddenly evaporates, the worst move is often a blanket, panicky discount. This devalues your product for the long term and teaches customers to wait for a fire sale.

• Pivot to Granular Intelligence: The pivot requires immediate, granular analysis of the remaining demand. Which routes, packages, or booking windows are still performing? Your commercial team must switch from macro-forecasting to micro-segmentation, adjusting pricing daily, sometimes hourly, on a segment-by-segment basis. If you're selling a complex product, you need to quickly identify the commercial value of your most resilient components.

2. Inventory: Shifting from Abundance to Control

In a stable market, inventory is a resource to be maximised. In a crisis, it's a liability to be controlled. My experience taught me that proactive inventory management can save a business from crippling refund burdens.

• The Pullback: During severe uncertainty, you must proactively pull back certain inventory, especially that which requires significant upfront supplier payment or is subject to high operational risk. This is a tough decision, but it protects your cash flow.

• The Re-Packaging: Use your remaining, safer inventory to create new, simplified products that require fewer moving parts and are easier for your Operations team to manage. This often means temporarily ditching highly complex itineraries for simpler, guaranteed components. The goal is to sell what you can absolutely deliver without fail.

3. Cancellation Policies: Empathy as a Strategic Asset

When the market is stable, cancellation policies are seen as a contractual guardrail. In a crisis, they become your most visible statement of brand values and a powerful commercial tool.

• The Empathy-Driven Policy: During a crisis, customer trust is at an all-time low. Sticking rigidly to a pre-crisis policy can lead to reputational damage that costs far more than the immediate loss of revenue. We must remember the lesson from Operations: Empathy is Revenue.

• The Flexibility Pivot: Commercial teams must quickly pivot to offer maximum flexibility. This could mean waiving change fees, offering future credit (vouchers) instead of cash, or providing tiered flexibility that rewards customers who choose to rebook instead of cancelling outright. This is a crucial Commercial move that protects your cash, retains the customer relationship, and upholds the promise of the Partnerships you’ve built.

The Commercial Leader's Crisis Checklist

The underlying lesson from navigating these shifts is that resilience in commercial strategy requires a blend of speed, data, and empathy.

1. Freeze Your Assumptions: Old models are dead. Rely only on the latest data.

2. Protect Cash Flow: Prioritise financial liquidity over maximising short-term sales volume.

3. Align with Ops: Ensure every commercial pivot (especially in pricing and policy) is immediately executable and manageable by the Operations and customer service teams. Disconnected commercial strategy is fatal.

The crisis pivot is not about survival alone; it’s about demonstrating leadership. It's about implementing an urgent strategy that genuinely makes a difference to both the balance sheet and the customer's life.