Kelly Cookes, leisure director of Advantage Travel Partnership, talks about the mind and the importance of using this time to spend on training, including the different industry resources available.
Focusing on the mind, she explained that it is necessary to keep one?s mind active and challenged.
There are thousands of furloughed employees at this difficult time, they play a vital role in our industry at this moment. The furloughed scheme helps the business to protect for the long term and the employees who are furloughed get the opportunity to spend time with their family.
They have children at home so looking after them and doing house schooling can be done. Of course, it is a difficult time. They are isolated, do not get to see their colleagues every day and hence might feel left out of the loop with what is happening with the business. "We have to adapt how we work at the moment. Everything is changing, like how we are working on how tour operators are engaging with agents."
There are some fantastic examples of how different tourist boards have changed their training programmes. For example, Jamaica is using live streaming on Instagram where they are doing live DJ sets with music, cook-along, and it seems like a lot of opportunities that one can take advantage of at the moment. We just need to keep up the speed with what is happening in the industry.
Cookes said: ?We have created a new training section within the coronavirus section on the hoop. Loads of information are there, some of it is around ?how to guide? like, how to create video contents from marketing, there are pieces around profit protection for anyone to review their current business.?
They are also putting in resources from their main partners to give details on what tourist boards are doing, YouTube channel links and live webinars to join.
Cooks further goes on saying that even if someone is not interested in anything related to travel, lots of other resources are there. One can choose to do something completely different like social media marketing, places one can go to and learn a new language and more.
Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfQEes6tffU
