AAXO NEWS
It is time to reinvent and re-invest in ourselves By Phetogo Kubheka, AAXO board member
It has been a long eight months for the tourism industry, with large-scale job losses and company shutdowns. Our members have felt the effects of Covid-19 and as a means to retain and revive the industry, as an association, we have been at the forefront of aggressively pushing for the events and exhibition sector to re-open. With precaution at hand, we want to ensure we reopen the industry safely in adherence to all new Covid-19 protocols.
A
s we scan the market, we realise that although several of our industry’s players have had to shut their doors, there are those who were able to keep their doors open. This encourages us that we need to reinforce our efforts to get back what we lost and partner-up where necessary in order to revitalise the industry.
Reinvent
What is essential going forward, for all our members and industry partners, is to look at how to reinvent themselves. Now more than ever, it is absolutely vital to adapt into a different form. This means relooking at the way companies package their deals, the way they market their brands, highlighting health and safety to their customers and mitigating their clients fears in order to secure those physical
events in the future. This means ensuring quality is not being compromised at a risk of saving costs to counteract the additional operational expenses of Covid-19 protocol measures. There are easy wins in terms of our industry to retain our current clients and gradually start attracting new ones: • Have readily available packages for small events, as per legislated numbers, to ensure your clients are not still doing the research, but rather that you have done the research for them, making you the obvious choice as everything has been set out for the client (Package A – 50 pax, Package B – 100 pax etc.) • Since PPE is an essential item for all engagements, not just for buildup and breakdown of events, find a way to provide this as a free value-add to your client for the next event. Partner up with
a supplier and put in place a trade exchange to facilitate this. Noting that there could be a second wave of infections, as we’ve seen in Europe, start planning now for the future should this happen. • Re-purposes of venues to leverage potential loss of business - Renting out parking space to personal trainers for their one-on-one sessions with private clients who don’t want to go to the gym or open up their home to a stranger - Hiring your kitchen facilities to chefs or vetted catering companies who work the graveyard shift in order to service their clients’ lunchtime deliveries before they go to their regular day work • Re-looking at cancellation clauses, as we don’t know what the future holds; but
