Focus on the right things
Jonas Törner, SVP Business Intelligence
What have been your focus areas during the year?
They have shifted, to say the least. From daily analytics and transactions in January and February, once March came we were quickly trying to forecast the immediate effects of the pandemic and government restrictions in all of Pandox’s markets and subsegments – up until the point when we realised there was no demand left at all in the short term. In that situation it became more important to focus instead on conceivable recovery scenarios and the effects of substantially reduced profitability in the industry, taking into account different countries’ relief packages and how these affect Pandox and our partners. When demand returned in the summer in line with our expectations, we intensified our analytics to get a better understanding of the hotel market’s various subsegments during a recovery phase – partly drawing on experience from entirely different hotel markets such as China, and partly by gathering and analysing completely new data points.
What are the greatest insights?
The main thing we are taking away from this is how quickly
markets and conditions can change – the fact that a pandemic and the subsequent government restrictions can paralyse the whole of society like this was probably not a risk that many companies had taken into account. Another lesson associated with this is how important it is to have a flexible organisation with short decision paths – one that can quickly refocus when required.
What are your tips for keeping up team spirit in times of corona?
Keep calm: be methodical, focus on the right things, make sure your colleagues have good conditions for working from home and look at each individual’s situation. Find small victories along the way. We never thought we would be pleased to have 40 percent occupancy...