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Enjoyed speaking at @skift’s virtual #skiftsummit today. I talked about how @Egencia mobilized for clients during this crisis & got lots of questions about it. It's not over. Our teams, partners & clients are still working hard, but here's the timeline I shared. Thread 
1/21
1/21
In January we saw coronavirus impact, initially in Hong Kong & China. We supported clients in APAC and globally with daily updates in Egencia Help Center, the latest information & travel disruptions. We also worked to support our colleagues who moved to work from home. 2/21
As Coronavirus spread more broadly in February, we saw countries applying control measures around those who had travelled to China. We set up a war room to manage 6 cross-functional workstreams and coordinate with Expedia Group war rooms that mobilized at the same time. 3/21
In March the virus started to spread to many more countries in Europe and North America, and beyond. This is when we saw customers rapidly asking for new capabilities that they hadn’t needed before – and we’d never thought of. 4/21
As things intensified, our war room adopted ‘follow the sun model’, with 24/7 coverage across workstreams: one team drove execution, then handed off to another team starting their day. 5/21
This approach also let us create some resilience, anticipating that some members of our team, or their families, might become sick. That might sound grim, but we had to consider that possibility, and plan for it. 6/21
3 days before WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, we enhanced our Traveler Tracker to search globally as well as by country, city or custom region drawn on a map. Clients requested and we added a ‘look back’ capability to search where travelers had been in the last 30 days. 7/21
That was critical as clients were trying to assess if their travelers could have been exposed to coronavirus as it spread, and might need testing, treatment, or quarantine. They needed a way to look back in time. It was a 3 day hackathon, with lives at stake. 8/21
As the crisis intensified, we realized we needed to do more to keep our Travel Consultants safe, and that based on our experience in China, many might need to work from home. 9/21
We moved quickly to “virtualize” our Global Customer Operations capabilities worldwide. We adapted new virtual telephony solutions, moved hardware, and coordinated across our teams to get as many Egencia Travel Consultants as possible the ability to work remotely. 10/21
In this way, we were able to offer seamless support in every country & language around the world, while reducing risk to our own people, who could stay home, stay safe, and still help our clients and travelers. 11/21
In mid-March when governments started closing their boarders, we did a number of things in quick succession, first improving and continuously updating guidance on modifying and cancelling trips directly through Egencia app and website,... 12/21
...and changing our hotel search to highlight the ability to filter hotel search results to show ones with flexible cancellation policies. 13/21
We added Bulk cancellation capabilities for clients; made our Help Center resources public to support travelers with the latest guidance, travel advice and information on flexible travel policies, cancellation and rebooking 14/21
Over the last 2 weeks, we enacted an even more flexible hotel cancellation policy, quickly enabled online self-serve penalty-free cancellation for previously non-refundable rates (March 16 through April 30); 15/21
We highlighted hotel closures so it was easy for travelers to avoid booking hotels we know are closed but might not have fully updated their inventory management systems 16/21
We updated air cancellation and hotel policy reporting by creating a COVID-19 reporting hub in Egencia Analytics Studio. This lets TMs extract forward-looking reports. 17/21
For air it details flight transactions that have been cancelled by airline/GDS. For hotel it shows active hotel bookings with known hotel cancellation policy, GBV & cancellation windows. 18/21
This week we’re continuing our war room workstreams, holding more virtual events and webinars for clients and the market, facilitating Egencia’s online community for customers (peer-to-peer networking and sharing best practices). 19/21
Taking a breath this week, Coronavirus created a crisis for our industry, our partners, our clients – for all of us. @Egencia's efforts weren’t unique, or perhaps even unusual. But we hope this story of how we pulled together helps someone out there. 20/21
Looking forward, "where there’s life, there’s travel." That will be true again, I hope very soon. As this crisis lifts, as an industry, we will emerge from it better, wiser, and stronger. Until then, stay home, stay safe, and wash your hands! 21/end
