2020 started with the promise of becoming a record-breaking year in Corporate Travel’s (CTS) 55-year history. The year launched with an inaugural sailing of the now highly acclaimed Good News Cruise® in January which set the pace. CTS, by every key metric, was poised for an exciting year in executing on our mission! Our team had invested three years of planning and incredibly hard work with the highest of hopes for 2020!
The CTS team had planned a record number of amazing, once-in-a-lifetime, large-scale events: a sophisticated Beethoven choral and orchestral music Festival at the Musikverein in Vienna, more than 1,000 travelers booked for the Oberammergau Passion Play, a grand Poland music festival celebrating the 100th anniversary of Pope St. John Paul II’s birth, our largest student event at Mackinac’s Grand Hotel, and 7 full ship music charters in collaboration with our valued partners at Star Vista Live. And this doesn’t even consider our collaboration on new and exciting endeavors with our long-time partners Steve Ray and Footprints of God, Teresa Tomeo and T’s Italy, Dr. Liz Lev and Master’s Gallery, Legatus, Ave Maria Radio, and the Vatican Patrons of the Arts. Hundreds of families and couples had also planned extraordinary dream vacations through our retail agency, Exceptional Journeys. Whew! All told, the CTS team developed, negotiated, marketed, and enrolled more than 30,000 travelers for our 2020 year as of January 2020! Little did we know that our anticipation of a historic year would be altered by a very different and unexpected historic event...
ENTER THE PANDEMIC
Utter chaos, panic and fear unleashed across the globe and the CTS team was immediately thrust into an incomprehensible set of fire-fighting tasks. With less than a third of the team, CTS was forced to unwind years’ worth of work in just a few short weeks. Emergency all-nighters ensued to expatriate groups from Europe and the middle East. A tsunami of calls deluged our team from clients rightfully demanding answers on the ongoing continuing uncertainty. Resolving tours was complicated by a growing and widespread set of issues that ranged from emergency overseas legislation regarding deposits, vendor closures, and millions of dollars of obligations associated with forward Euro contracts. The deposits had been invested in every imaginable itinerary inclusion from restaurants and hotels to nearly bankrupt airlines to closed music venues. Weeks passed with no communication from these vendors other than “we are unable to return your deposit.”
There is no fair way to fully characterize the trauma or the degree of work on our shoulders. And there is no way to soften the anguish of those who have seen loved ones fall to this menacing virus. And yet, throughout and despite the hardship and loss, we work still! And we do so in hopeful expectation!
THE BRIGHTEST LIGHTS