By Brent Blake
Our role as a travel management company is to be your partner in achieving success.
We are not here to tell you that you must travel, when you must travel or where you must travel. If travel is a tactic that helps you to achieve success, then we are ready to assist you by developing a program that allows you to be efficient as possible, financially sound as possible and risk averse as possible.
In order to do that, however, we cannot effectively partner with you only by reading countless electronic newsletters or participating in hours upon hours of Zoom meetings. If we are to be a good partner, then we must get out on the road and share with you our observations, our experiences and our conversations with those in the field.
So, a few days ago, Acendas Senior Vice President Joe Curtis and I did exactly that. We drove to the airport, parked our car at an off-property facility, checked-in at the gate, went through TSA., and then flew on a plane. Upon landing, we retrieved our luggage, secured a rental car, checked in a hotel, and ate at a restaurant. We essentially reversed those steps in returning home.
Rather than draft a document in an attempt to describe our experience, we were joined by a videographer to record our activity. You can watch the end result here (please remember these are actual people, not actors — as if you couldn’t tell).
I’ll be totally honest — I was not gung ho to travel. And neither was Joe. Neither of us are considered to be at risk. Our reservations were more based on what we didn’t know than what we did know. So our first step was to educate ourselves as much as we could. And second, we adhered to the guidelines of government and health authorities.
We hope the video is educational and informative. Whether or not to travel is a personal choice. But from my perspective, I was reassured by the steps the travel industry has taken to ensure safety and well-being. In a previous blog, I noted that travel will return to previous levels if people have trust and confidence in the process. After our first foray into travel during the Covid-19 era, I am confident the industry has risen to the challenge.