As shops reopen and flights resume, Travel Weekly is this week calling on agents and suppliers to help us shape practical advice and inspiring content to support you as you rebuild
Travel Weekly has launched a new Roadmap to Recovery banner to identify content and resources designed to help the travel trade rebuild in the wake of the coronavirus shutdown.
The move marks a progression of Travel Weekly’s wide-ranging activity since the beginning of the crisis, and comes as the industry’s focus shifts from the immediate impact and fallout of the pandemic to how businesses can restart and evolve.
Essential content
Starting this week and running over the coming months, Travel Weekly Roadmap to Recovery content will include:
- Interviews: Webcast interviews with industry leaders with a focus on how travel companies can rebuild and recover. Executives featured this week include former Azamara chief Larry Pimentel, Intrepid Travel chief executive James Thornton and Trafalgar chief executive Gavin Tollman.
- Issues: Webcasts focusing on key issues for the return of travel, with two opening panel sessions this week on the topic of insurance.
- Product: More destination and product-focused interviews and agent training webcasts, with experts next week focusing on the short-haul market for late summer and the autumn.
- Advice webinars: Regular Roadmap to Recovery advice webinars and features, starting with experts from Travlaw picking out key issues and answering questions from travel companies looking to reshape and rebuild their businesses.
- Partnerships: Tie-ups with tourist boards and suppliers as they reopen and relaunch to connect them with agents and help deliver the latest updates on products, pricing and trade activity.
- Collaboration: More collaboration with sector associations and regional destination organisations to create and relay educational resources and updates.
- Inspiration: First-person webcasts and features with readers offering peer-to-peer advice and support.
- Business recovery: The rebranding of Travel Weekly’s online resource hub as the Roadmap to Recovery Resource Centre, with a focus on business recovery and personal advice for owners and others within the trade.
- Positivity: The extension of Travel Weekly’s Good Deed Feed to celebrate positive stories and showcase individuals and brands who go the extra mile.
Advice and inspiration
Lucy Huxley, Travel Weekly’s editor-in-chief, said: “The travel industry continues to face fundamental challenges, and over the past four months we have adapted our own business to inform, support and connect the trade to the best of our abilities in these unprecedented circumstances.
“We look forward to resuming print production of Travel Weekly as soon as it becomes viable. In the meantime, we want to ensure we are delivering the most-useful and relevant content across our portfolio of digital and social media channels and the online version of our magazine.”
She added: “Throughout this crisis we have continued to publish inspiring destination and product content and to record practical advice-based webcasts to do all we can to ensure readers will be ready when enquiries return. And in recent weeks we have finally seen agents and suppliers starting to plan for the future as restrictions on travel and daily life begin to ease.
“We aim to continue building on those efforts in the months ahead, and are calling on readers to help us shape our Roadmap to Recovery content and ensure we are covering the topics and providing the information they need to rebuild their businesses.”
Since the beginning of lockdown, visitors have flocked to Travel Weekly’s website to access news, analysis, practical business advice, destination and themed features, and daily webcasts featuring interviews with industry leaders, business experts and frontline travel sellers.
In May, the site logged a record 1.75 million pageviews, up from a previous record 1.54 million in April.
The tools behind your Roadmap to Recovery
News and analysis
Since the start of lockdown on March 23, Travel Weekly has published more than 1,800 articles on travelweekly.co.uk, in addition to producing twice-daily email newsletters and sector-specific news and features from sister titles Travolution and Aspire. We will continue to cover the latest news and break the biggest stories, and will also increase our coverage of companies’ and destinations’ recovery plans and efforts.
News You Can Use
This popular section will become even more prominent in the coming months as suppliers and destinations restart and reopen. Travel Weekly will work closely with suppliers and tourist boards to ensure agents have the latest updates on brands’ trade activity, plus product and pricing news to help them rebuild their sales.
Frontline
The part of the magazine devoted to readers and their businesses will feature an increased focus on the reopening and restart of travel, with peer-to-peer comment and content appearing in the digital edition and on travelweekly.co.uk. Sections include Agent Diary, Your Stories, Get Social, advice from agents and industry partners, and regular Spotlight pages on specific events and themes.
Destinations
As soon as the crisis hit, we made a commitment to keep bringing you up-to-date destination content with a new message of #inspiringfuturetravel. We’ve published practical sales guides on timely subjects such as trends in millennial travel, domestic breaks and villa holidays, as well as webcast interviews examining the prospects for this year’s winter-sun market, how hotels and resorts are adapting to social distancing requirements, and how to sell specialist sectors such as rail and adventure holidays. Look out for more inspiring and informative content in the months ahead.
Help us support your recovery
Let us know what you would like us to cover under the Travel Weekly Roadmap to Recovery banner and how we can help you rebuild your business.
Simply email roadmaptorecovery@travelweekly.co.uk, with Roadmap as the subject line.
For sponsorship and commercial options relating to Roadmap to Recovery content and projects, email Mary Rega on mary.rega@travelweekly.co.uk