It’s a tough time to be in the travel industry, and an even tougher time to figure out the balance between marketing your air service and reassuring people about the steps you’re taking to mitigate the spread of viruses. Is it possible to promote summer travel to families and not appear that you have your head in the sand on the concerns people have about COVID-19? The worst thing any airport marketing professional can do is stop everything. You might pause some of your marketing and advertising for a time, but then you need to step up your public relations to stay in front of your audience, reassure them, and provide helpful information so that you are almost viewed as a helpful friend. At the same time, behind the scenes, you should continue to plan marketing campaigns so that when things turnaround (and they will!) you are ready to go and don’t waste a second in getting things back up and running. In fact, it will be critical that you hit the ground running as soon as things turn around. We’ve come up with several suggestions for internal and external communications, and a list of resources for factual information, tools and advice. Now the hard part, finding the balance between marketing air travel and promoting caution around COVID-19. You might want to consider pulling paid search and display advertising until later in the year and then reassess. The concern with these types of digital advertising is that you don’t have a lot of room for messaging and could appear uncaring and uninformed to some people who are very concerned about catching Coronavirus. Focus your messages on: While you’re slowing your advertising efforts (but don’t forget to step up the public relations efforts!), you don’t want to stop planning for the ramp up you’ll need to make when things come back to normal. Learn more about creating your recovery plan here. Official Airline ResourcesBalancing Marketing and Sensitivity
What should you say about COVID-19 and where should you say it?
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