Travel management companies and corporate travel managers are operating under a crisis scenario in Japan as they attempt to move thousands of travelers, expatriates and their families following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that rocked the northeastern portion of the country. With the situation at the Fukushima nuclear power plant worsening, corporate travel professionals and industry observers for now can only speculate on when substantially reduced business travel demand in Japan will recover.
As a fluid situation continues to unfold, TMCs have been challenged to help affected companies while they themselves had operations impacted by the disaster. For example, much of Hogg Robinson Group's team in Japan has "been unable to get into work because of the disruption in the infrastructure and because of this fear of people being told to stay indoors or to stay at home," according to HRG commercial director Stewart Harvey.
Despite such conditions, HRG and its fellow corporate agencies have been helping to evacuate travelers and relocate client employee groups. "We simply needed to put more people on to cope with this demand," Harvey said. "Some of our workers have been working through the night and they are sleeping on their feet."
BCD Travel executive vice president of global business solutions Louise Miller said the agency "had to be very creative to extend our hours of operation, staff up with our work-at-home and our part-time staff and, overall, we were able to get to the travelers in terms of answering the phone."
To handle a heavy volume of calls from affected clients, American Express, BCD Travel and HRG rerouted calls from their Japanese offices to other locations or designated Japan relief hotlines. "It was really all hands on deck with not only our teams working out of Tokyo or in Japan, but even as call volumes increased, to reroute some calls to our Melbourne offices and other places in the region to make sure that we are able to answer clients' needs," an Amex spokeswoman explained.
In addition to servicing expats, TMCs also have had to handle large numbers of Japanese citizens who were out of the country when the earthquake hit and anxious to return. "There are a lot of Japanese traveling on business to somewhere else in the world, and we want to get our guys back to their homes and their families to give them assurance and comfort," said HRG's Harvey.
Initially locating client travelers inside Japan "was the easy piece," Harvey said. "We did that within hours of the earthquake and as the tsunami was still rolling. The real challenge has been more the effects of that, the effects of the infrastructure and this human element of communicating with people and getting them comfort." However, corporate efforts to protect employee privacy in some cases hampered communications. "Not all companies require travelers to give us multiple phone numbers, and some travelers were pretty easy to reach and some travelers were very difficult to reach," said BCD's Miller.
Radiation from the damaged nuclear plant prompted relocation of groups of client employees, or in some cases entire offices, to southern Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore or other areas, according to TMC sources. The U.S. State Department advised all citizens within 50 miles of the plant to leave the area.
'Forget Your Travel Policies'
During the crisis, corporate travel policies in some cases were disregarded. "You remember that there is a family at the other end," said Harvey. "You do it with a business sense, but you have to have a level of compassion about this as well. Forget your travel policies; our advice at the moment is to drop it. We are not into writing blank checks, but let's not try and say we are only working with our corporate fares or corporate negotiated hotel rooms."
Meanwhile, some stranded travelers "have been running out of their own funds, and their corporate cards are getting topped out with hotel charges," Harvey added. HRG is working with payment systems and corporate travel managers to increase credit limits, he said.
'Only Critical Trips'
Given initial service cuts by several airlines, flights that had been operating--notably in and out of Tokyo--quickly filled up, Harvey said, leaving many travelers stranded. But after some initial hurdles, according to Miller, "the airlines have done a great job at resuming so much of their schedule that we have not seen companies use [many] charter aircraft." She noted that more than 250 BCD Travel accounts have been affected.
According to iJet Intelligent Risk Systems president Bruce McIndoe, travel agencies and corporate travel managers have been working to get expatriates "on commercial aircraft--either to a staging area or to their home country."
In addition to a tremendous number of canceled trips to Japan, Carlson Wagonlit Travel also has seen many requests to modify itineraries that originally included connections through Tokyo. "Many travelers have shared comments about wanting to avoid traveling through Japan for now because they are concerned about flight delays and/or possible risks associated with the nuclear situation," according to a CWT press official. Although there are "some travelers keeping their previously scheduled travel plans to Japan at this time, we are seeing very few new bookings into Japan right now."
According to BCD Travel, most companies have limited travel to Japan to "only critical trips or those related to relief efforts."
While American Express also has experienced cancellations and fewer new bookings to Japan, a spokeswoman indicated that "the outlook is that things will stabilize. Business travel is something that businesses need to do but it's hard to tell at this time what the long-term impact will be."
According to a research note issued by Morgan Stanley analysts, "consumer sentiment shocks are more likely to impair leisure demand than business. Often in the past, demand has snapped back, resulting in a V-shaped trend."
Pulling Together
The challenging situation has spurred a sense of cooperation among TMCs, including booking travel for non-clients. Even when an agency is not under contract to serve a stranded traveler, "you put that aside and the human bit comes in," said HRG's Harvey. "In some respect, it's a bit humbling."
Many BCD Travel employees opted to stay in Japan to communicate with colleagues, according to Miller. The company also set up a YouTube channel and a message center on a company intranet site. "We were able to create a group where employees can go in and find out what is going on, and hear directly from Greg O'Neil, who is the president of our Asia/Pacific region, right there on the ground helping clients," she said. "They can read stories about what other clients are doing. It was a way to share best practices and keep everyone in the loop, but it was also a way to help encourage each other through a very difficult time."
The U.S. government also played a role by providing chartered aircraft to stranded U.S. citizens and easing visa rules. "The U.S. government, the Japanese government and other major governments around the world have done a great job at having creative ways to get through the immigration procedures," said Miller. "We have not heard a lot of examples where travelers were not able to cut through the red tape to get on their flights."