A few days ago, I found myself wandering through YouTube and came across an old advertisement for a well-known national airline. By my guess, it ran a generation ago, based on the look and feel of the grainy ad.
In it, the Vice President of Sales calls his team together in the office to announce that they had just been fired by their oldest client, someone who they’ve done business with for over 20 years. The boss looks crestfallen as he explained the current nature of business, full of phone calls or faxes (this was an old ad) and bemoans the lack of a personal connection with their clients.
He said that the fired us because they didn’t know us anymore.
The next scene shows the Executive Assistant as she hands out airline tickets to the entire sales team so that they could personally visit and reconnect with their clients. The VP picked up his ticket and he said he was off to visit the company that just fired him. The voiceover by an Academy Award actor restates the airline’s value story before the music rises and the commercial fades to black.
If you can look beyond the dated quality of the ad, some truths begin to emerge. Yes, the people around the table were predominately white and male. Yes, you had to look hard to find any shred of diversity. However, if you look past all of these things, you might get a glimpse of where business travel might be heading once we get through the pandemic.
Right now, business travel is comatose and even deadly for some. It is suspected that the 8 million people who traveled over the recent Thanksgiving holiday have turned themselves into super spreaders as we move into a very deadly third wave.
So, what happens next?
Payments, Fraud, and Leadership 