Rethinking Your Service Process I’ve just gotten off a webinar in which the speaker, an economics professor, casually said something like, “…of course the hospitality industry will suffer the most. Even after the supply side is back to 100-percent, consumers will be reluctant to travel, eat out and go to events. However, this will accelerate online shopping habits…” This may be true. So after my initial, angry, internal monologue about how someone could be so callously insensitive as to verbally toss an entire industry aside before moving on with the rest of his speech, I realized that now is the time for our industry to really get creative. A very unscientific poll done by WDWMagic.com on March 26 popped into my news feed last week. They asked their readers when they were planning to go again to Walt Disney World, with choices ranging from, “As soon as the park reopens,” to “No plans to return.” Disney fans are arguably some of the most dedicated and loyal brand advocates in the hospitality industry, and readers of this particular site can be counted within that group. So, it would stand to reason that a poll about plans for returning to Disney World taken with dedicated Disney loyalists should provide a best-case scenario for what the future will hold for demand-side recovery. Results were mixed. Approximately 20-percent of the 1,184 respondents said they would return either as soon as the parks reopened or within the first month of reopening. Another 20-percent said they’d return within three to six months of the reopening. Twenty-three percent said they were planning to return sometime in 2020. The groups responding that they didn’t plan to return until 2021 (27.2%) or that they had no plans to return (6.4%) are cause for concern. One could argue that planning a trip to Disney World is not directly relatable to an evening out to local restaurants or events, but again, these
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