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210: Care For Customers In Crises with Chris Dane

Chris Dane, President of Hickory Global Partners, an industry-leading global alliance for corporate travel organizations and corporate travel departments. We discuss invaluable insights into navigating the intricacies of travel operations. From crafting robust crisis management frameworks to redefining the role of travel advisors in the digital age, a compelling exploration of the evolution of the travel industry and strategies for success in a constantly evolving landscape.

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Care for Customers in Crises with Chris Dane

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest is Chris Dane, President of Hickory Global Partners, an industry-leading global alliance for corporate travel organizations and corporate travel departments. Chris, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Steve, for having me.

Well, I don’t often have guests from the corporate travel industry. I think I had one in the last 12 months, 15 months. So I’m curious about what you brought for us. So let’s start with how did you get into corporate travel in the first place and rose to run a premier organization in the field?

Well, actually, this May will be my 50th anniversary of travel, which is another way of saying I’m old and still working. And that’s only because I love it. I started in the airline business, actually I was raised in the travel industry. My father was with Eastern Airlines, so I never wanted to pay for air travel, so I started out of college with predecessor to Frontier Airlines, as you would know it today. Later spent 20 years with American Airlines, and then left there to run Delta Airlines Vacations. That’s a package tour operator. And then left that to be one of the founders of a company called vacation.com, where we went out and bought six US and one Canadian consortium, which is a group of travel agents, a buying club, think of it. In this particular case, it’s specialized in leisure. We sold it two years later to Amadeus. And then I ended up my first consulting gig, also my most lucrative, was as a friend of mine called me, said, look, these are really bright Harvard MBAs. I think they could use your help. He says, I don’t think the model makes sense, but my wife convinced me to invest a lot of money in it. And so tell me what you think, and I’ll set up an interview. They’ll see if they think you’re okay, and you can see if what they’re doing makes sense.

Well, that little startup that he talked about was a little company called TripAdvisor. Share on X

Wow.

And as you know, that went on to do great things. They sold it to Expedia, and then they spun off on their own. And so that was really a pretty exciting time. Then I went to work for a predecessor to this company, Hickory Global Partners, and then I left that to go run, which was my first foray into corporate travel. This is like ‘05, ‘06. Then I went to work for, at that time, the third largest travel management company in the world, publicly held on the London Exchange. It was called Hogg Robinson Group. I left there to come here, Hickory Global Partners, and then since I’ve been here, we’ve purchased a couple of other companies that I also have the pleasure of making contributions to. One is a company that is independent contractors, specializes in leisure, and it’s called IntelliTravel. And it’s independent contractors. We teach them to travel business so they can book their friends and relatives on trips and earn money in the process. And then just recently we bought a MICE company, a Meeting Incentive Corporate Event Company, and I’m on the board of that company. So while I’ve been in the business 50 years, I now have three jobs.

Okay, well, that keeps you young, I guess.

I hope.

That’s a good way to do it. So I never thought that MICE was a really attractive thing for the travel industry, but it’s good to learn that. So let’s talk about some of your experiences that I think could be interesting for our listeners, specifically about crisis management. So you were instrumental in developing the CARE framework for worst-case travel scenarios, and that taught you a bunch of stuff about crisis management. So what is your framework for crisis management? If someone is facing the crisis, what are the four things that they have to think about?

Well, let me tell you how I got into it. Probably the best place to start. I opened Albuquerque for American Airlines. It was a small market, small media market. And any time there was an incident, they would call me. And I guess the local station earns extra income if they submit a story to National and they use it. Well, apparently, this local CBS affiliate thought I was pretty insightful. You know, things involving hijacking. In one case, it was an airplane crash, and they would release it to the national media. And I had already been through media training to learn how to deal with these kinds of things as it related to the media, and what to say and not say. Later on in my career in America, I was in headquarters, and I was appointed to the GO team in the event that there was any kind of an error incident, my group had to deal with the families. And we were totally unprepared. If we had an incident, people would have been jumping over one another to fire me because we were totally unprepared. I put together a program through an outside firm, HR helped me a lot, whereby we tried to design a program that could deal with the worst case scenario at that time on American system, which was losing a plane in the Pacific on the way to Japan or having a plane crash in the Andes in South America. And the biggest plane we had at that time was an MD-11. It sat about 330 people.

And so we developed a program that used only management staff. Share on X

Could be trained in. We did not want union people because we did not want to be in a very intense crisis situation dealing with overtime and that kind of thing. So we trained 700 management staff on how to deal with the families. It was much more serious than you think. You can’t say, I know how you feel, because you don’t. You had to be able to ask in a very delicate way for toothbrushes, dental records, anything with DNA so we could help identify. You had to use a lot of sympathy and you worked with them all the way through the process. It was so well received that the FAA later required every airline that flew into the U.S. had to have a similar program. Now, they didn’t take all of it, but they took components of it. And of course, the negative person would say, well, you were doing that just to avoid a lawsuit. No, we weren’t. We were doing it because it was the empathetic, it was the right thing to do, and we were going to get sued anyways. We knew that. It didn’t really matter. When we had a couple of incidents, we found that some people would get PTSD from being on site with the families and they couldn’t cope. So we just kind of quietly, you know, didn’t call on them anymore. We had a couple of people that worked in multiple incidents over about a six-year period and we had to move them out because that was just really too tough. And anytime you were on one of these events, it was a six-week process. So it was a really intense program. Probably the most notable thing about it at the time is I spent four million dollars developing the program and never wrote one memo to justify the expense. Because everybody knew that was the right thing to do. And as I said, it was forced to be copied so much so that Asiana had a plane land in San Francisco several years ago. It crashed basically on the runway. And they later got fined because they had a plan in place, but they didn’t implement it. And what they did implement does not meet all the criteria that the FAA and DOT had set out. So that’s how serious this stuff was taken.

Yeah.

So it had never existed before.

Yeah.

In an organized manner.

And then it was taken for granted that it had to be used. So, Chris, in our pre-call, you talked about the four areas that really need to be addressed and how you address them. You talk about customers, medical, media and cultural. Can you talk a little bit about these and why they are important and how do you what do you focus on when you deal with customers, when you deal with medical and so on?

And that’s exactly what the training focused on. Not so much the media piece of it because we tried to frankly stay away from the media and let DOT handle anything to do with the incident. Ours was how to do it in a manner that is emotional, caring, trying to be in their shoes without saying that, and understanding what they were going through, having a lot of sympathy, dealing with the emotions of the family, how do you deal with that? And there’s a whole skill set. I mean, it was really pretty interesting. The company that developed the training for it, I can’t remember the name, but they were out of Atlanta. And I remember going, I went through the first class to see what it was like, and I remember it was a beautiful day in DFW and I just spent two days in this meeting on dealing with death and dying and you walked out and it was draining. It truly, just going through the training, was draining. So you can imagine that when the real thing hit, how difficult it would be for people to deal with it.

So we were really focused on the customers and their families and how to deal with grief, death and dying in a very, very compassionate way. Share on X

So let’s switch gears here from crisis management to back to the travel corporate travel industry. So where is this industry going? Everything is going online and AI is getting involved. Are there really still corporate real estate agents, sorry, travel agents that work with executives or they are gone and the personal assistants go online? How does that work? And what are the trends going into 2024?

Well, you know, the conventional wisdom always says that there’s still travel agents. And indeed there are in the US, there’s about 11,000 of them. There’s probably 200,000 independent contractors in the US alone. So they’re very much alive. And interestingly enough, you know, Gen X has rediscovered travel agents because they want what I like to call a “single throat to choke” and they don’t want it to be theirs. They want to entrust somebody who can match up their needs and give them advice. It’s not online. Yes, certainly there’s stuff you can book online. You know, if you’ve been on a carnival cruise and you like carnival and you want to go again, it’s less likely you need a travel advisor for it, except for things they can do for you that you can’t do for yourself, possibly get you an upgrade, possibly give you a gift in the room, recommend the right cruise for the people that you’re with and traveling with. So really, travel advisors are a consultative position, and they are not dead. You find out how alive they are every time there’s, let’s say, a major incident that disrupts travel, say with weather or whatever, you can’t get through to the airlines. You know, if you booked it online, you wanted to get to Expedia or booking, virtually impossible. But more than likely, I can get to my advisor and they can make alternative arrangements and pick up where I can’t make happen.

Yeah.

And travel has become much more complicated, of course, since COVID, in terms of the particularly internationally. And that’s where they come into play as well, to save you from making any mistakes with visas or passports, to help you. It’s not just booking a flight, anybody can do that. Now, where AI, to your point, Steve, where AI is going to come into play, they’re gonna help make the advisors process much more smooth, help doing the research much faster, and probably even giving more offers. Obviously, an advisor doesn’t know everywhere in the world somebody wants to go, but they can help feed the AI app, if you will, and get back information to help zero in what the customer wants. AI is, you know, it can only go so far today with travel, but it doesn’t tell you the whole story and it’s just the first step, and the advisor can pick up from there and start to hone in on what’s important to the customer, what’s not, what do they want to do, what don’t they want to do.

Yeah, we can ask the right questions from the AI because that’s the biggest thing, to ask the AI to do the stuff the right way. If you don’t, then they’re just going to give you a big hallucination. But if you have the right prompts and you know how to ask it, then you can really amplify knowledge.

Yeah, we’re using AI at Hickory for some of our marketing pieces. They pull forward the basic content that we clean it up.

Yeah.

We’re using it for blogs. And sister company, IntelliTravel, is developing an AI process to do just what I explained, to help the advisor narrow in on what the traveler wants, and that’s very much in development. And the AI is also helping us develop programs a lot quicker. So there’s a huge use of AI, but not the way the typical person will think about it. If you have a problem and you’re with your family and something goes wrong, you are gonna catch the grief, whereby, and I don’t want my throat to be choked, frankly, with my wife and kids. I want somebody else to take that heat from me and help get me out of a situation I’m in. But today, you know, as you look at travel, there are more what they call IROPs, irregular operations, on the airline side than ever before. Still much higher than 90, mainly due to a shortage of air traffic controllers that still exist. And so when those situations occur, you cannot get through to an airline. So you want somebody that you don’t want to wait on hold for 40 minutes. My daughter was in town this week from Albuquerque and she wanted to change her flight home. I won’t tell you which airline, but she was on hold for 40 minutes and they wouldn’t do it.

Yeah, that’s horrible. I hate missing late-night flights and then queue up just to get a Chevy hotel room and get in bed at midnight and arrives at 5. That’s not fun. So, Chris…

Yeah, so you wasted 40 minutes and got nowhere.

Yeah, and then you line up and then the queue is twice as long.

And got what you wanted in 25 minutes.

Awesome.

Made the changes and everything due to our travel advisor.

Okay, so you really sold me on the idea that I need to get a travel agent on IVL. So, Chris, finally, before we wrap up, I’d like to ask you, so what are you most excited about in 2024 working on? What are you working on and what are your plans?

A bunch of exciting things. I don’t want to sound like a sales commercial, but I’m probably, we started, people would refer to it as an after-hour service for our members. Nobody does it very well. We’re doing it really well. But it’s more than just that. It’s being able to supplement the agent’s employees when they can’t find one. So we have two employees on assignment to agencies. They’ve been unable to fill it. Yeah, we’re doing their after-hours service as well, but we’re also helping them manage their business. What’s known, if you make a change, it ends up in what they call a queue. We work the queues for them. So we’re taking non-essential work away from them so they can have more time with customers. We started the business a little less than a year ago. So that’s pretty exciting. And the stuff that we’re doing, you know, we’re dealing with groups for when they’re traveling, the day of the groups, we’re taking their requests, we’re getting it approved, we’re making the reservation, we’re writing the ticket. These are big groups, 2000, 3000 people, you know, for a single company going to their annual incentive trip. And so that’s really not after hours as we would know it in travel. So that’s pretty exciting. The stuff we’re doing on IntelliTravel with the AI to your point is exciting and development we’ve got going on. We’re developing a loyalty program for our members who make bookings. That should be rolling out in the next six weeks or so. That’s really exciting because you know we think of ourselves as still a small company and yet we’re developing a loyalty program just as say American Airlines or Expedia has a loyalty program.

So that's exciting and I've learned a lot about the MICE business since we purchased this company and that's what's really an exciting business and how people want to get together. Share on X

You know how they design the sets, how they do everything from collecting the money to taking the registration, to developing the theme. It takes a lot of creativity, a lot of various departments to do it and that’s been exciting to learn that because I really never knew much about it and so I’m really having fun with that. After 50 years in business I’m still really excited and that’s a great place to be.

By the way, you mentioned IntelliTravel. So James Ferrara was on our show earlier and he was a great guest. We got a lot of likes and shares on LinkedIn and on YouTube when he talked. So he’s obviously a bit of a star in your space.

First of all, he’s great on camera. He’s a great speaker, but he’s even a better executive. I work with James now, probably 9-10 years and just watching him grow has been one of the most exciting things in my entire business career to watch him grow and develop. He’s really impressive.

Yeah, he’s great. Well, Chris, thank you for coming on the show and sharing your 50 years of experience in the travel industry and especially crisis management and how to be empathetic but not presumptuous when you deal with people. This is a very valuable piece of advice. And if people would like to learn more, they would like to connect with you or find out about the after-hour service, where should they go?

They can go to our website hickoryglobalpartners.com. It’s on there. If they want to speak with me directly, they can go through LinkedIn. My profile is under Chris Dane. I forgot the code, but you’ll be able to find me. And I’ve enjoyed it very much Steve, I appreciate you doing this.

Absolutely, it was great to have you, Chris.

Thank you, sir.

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