As Australia slowly awakens, so is Luxury Escapes, the company that grew out of packaging luxury hotel experiences for Australian customers and, in the last seven years, has cast its net wider to Asia.

Like other travel companies, it too had to deal with a crisis of cancellations and change requests but its ability to move quickly to a self-service model with its “My Escape” feature helped cushion it from a worse impact, and its roots in the “Buy Now, Book Later” product line has also meant that even in the depths of the crisis, it was able to get bookings and payments with its built-in flexibility.

Some key takeaways:

“Buy Now, Book Later” feature comes to the rescue

“When we launched, it was part of a broader deals business. The voucher was really the only way we could offer it, there was no confirmed dates, system availability – that’s how we’ve been operating this business for the last three to five years. Obviously, it’s increased in significant popularity in the last couple of months. So it was very easy for us to pivot the business to that model and find that extra flexibility during this period when people needed it.”

Weaknesses exposed in travel eco-system as well as within companies

“Businesses that do practice solid, risk management processes have definitely fared better, so those are able to pivot quickly. Companies that have very high fixed overheads are always going to struggle.”

Wide array of travel conditions confusing for the consumer and a challenge for OTAs

“Travellers are going to expect more flexibility. What this crisis has shown is that flexibility means very different things to different people. There’s quite a varied array of travel conditions today – conditions of products sold, often for the same trip. That has caused quite a lot of confusion for customers, but also for intermediaries like OTAs – to be able to deal with customers and suppliers and be the middleman in those conversations … has been really, really quite, quite difficult.”

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