Tourism after the coronavirus crisis: new marketing, technologies and forecasts for the future from Tutu.ru

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Anna Goncharova, product manager of Tutu.ru

The crisis and the tourism industry — who will win? Tutu.ru knows the answer: they are launching the “Radar of Hope” for clients, hiring a robot preacher Batya for employees, and turning up the Taiwan WhatsApp number volume on Director FM and Standup Tutu. How has the crisis affected the industry and what awaits it in the future?

A few sad numbers
Contents
A few sad numbers
But we are holding on
“Anti-crisis” marketing
What to focus on now?
Robot preacher Batya
Director of FM
What will be in demand in the future?
Rostourism estimated quarterly losses from the suspension of inbound tourism at 300 billion rubles. Air travel in Russia suffered 90% in sales, bus transportation — 80-85%, rail — 80%.

The decline in the number of travelers (including business travelers) can be estimated by the losses of hotels. April 2020 versus April 2019 looks like this: In Europe: occupancy fell by 84.6%, to 11.1%, and the average daily accommodation price fell by 30.1%, to 77.52 euros. In Russia, occupancy fell by 89%, to 7.2%, and the daily accommodation price became cheaper by 25.3% and is estimated at 3,712 rubles. Moscow had an average occupancy of 9.1%, St. Petersburg — 2.8%.

A wave of bankruptcies is expected both for travel players (carriers, travel agencies, hotels) and for projects dependent on them (aggregators, restaurants, guides, translators, etc.).

But we are holding on
Tutu.ru is the #1 Russian travel service (according to the GfK cross-media panel), where you can buy train, plane and bus tickets, check commuter train schedules, find travel packages, book hotels, choose theme tours, expeditions or excursions. Tutu.ru has been operating since mid-2003 and has a monthly audience of 20 million unique users. According to SimilarWeb for May 2020, Tutu.ru is among the top 20 most popular sites in the world in the Travel category.

How has the crisis affected our work? The number of customer requests to exchange and return a ticket has tripled, the contact center was and still remains overloaded. We are seeing a decrease in sales growth and a drop in traffic - an obvious result of quarantine and restrictions related to the pandemic. This is a global trend, unfortunately.

During the closure of international passenger traffic (air, rail, bus, water) and a significant reduction in the number of domestic flights, we have to live by the new rules and adapt to them.

Interesting fact: sales of tickets for planes, trains and buses within the country did not stop. People continued to travel on open routes, although we did not call for this.

"Anti-crisis" marketing
Since the beginning of the "era of self-isolation" - in our case, since March 16 - we started several large projects at once, which involved our analysts, developers, product managers, marketing, communications department, press service, etc.

In early April, we launched the interactive project "Radar of Hope": https://hope.tutu.ru/, where you can see online on the world map open and closed flights, how the air traffic system is doing in general and what is happening at each airport.

You can also use the service to view restrictions and quarantine requirements for arrival in the desired city.

Another project based on the analysis of large amounts of information is a unique model of the spread of the virus, “sharpened” specifically for Russia, with a completely open source code.

We launched the “Checklist” with Rostourism - this is our ambition to create a hub with ready-made routes for each of the 85 regions of Russia based on this project. You can watch a video release about each region, read information, and also see photos of the sights and beauty of the region, that is, fully plan your next trip to Russia.

We also held two Zoom conferences: March 27 and April 16. The first “Remote from Travel” is more for our community, those who are not indifferent to travel. Bloggers, residents of Italy, Georgia and Israel, representatives of the airline and travel agencies, members of the Tutu team and other travel experts spoke at it. The second Zoom conference “How has the pandemic affected the passenger transportation market?” was more for journalists. We brought together representatives of the transport industry, experts shared forecasts, talked about the situation in their sector (how sales, demand, passenger behavior have changed, what restrictions there are).

Our content, which we publish on social networks and the Tutu.ru blog in the “Tutu Stories” section, has also changed. Now the emphasis is on making materials even more useful in the context of the changed reality. With the help of experts, we talked about how to protect yourself when traveling (on a bus, train, train or plane). We published a detailed interview with a pilot who explained why the risk of catching a virus in the cabin is minimal. Other materials touched on issues of how to survive the period of self-isolation