The meteor has struck. It’s time to start over.

If you work in the travel industry, the last few weeks have felt like every schlocky disaster movie cliché rolled in to one, the only difference being that Hollywood’s CGI is better than reality. The train has run out of control, hit an iceberg, caught fire, collapsed, blown up, been swept by a hurricane and we’re still waiting for Gerard Butler to save the day.

But whichever way you look at it, what can’t be denied is that the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the ‘industry of dreams’ like a metaphorical meteor. Life as it was known has been decimated, and surely the nightmare of a long, cold, Ice Age is beginning.

The fact is that there were dinosaurs in the travel industry, as there is across the whole corporate world, which needed to be killed off. Lumbering across the landscape, consuming vastly more resources than they contribute (except in the form of excessive amounts of waste products), glumly eating up exciting new businesses because ‘big is best’, talking a good game in terms of their commitments to sustainability, equality, customer centricity and employee responsibility but in reality doing very little - they have outlived their usefulness and become an anachronism in a world that yearns to be more connected, more collaborative and more conscious. Whether it is actual businesses, or the models and infrastructures they support (and feed off), it’s becoming increasingly clear that the impact of this microbiotic meteor is doing two things – forcing them to adapt to survive at a pace which was unthinkable just three months ago, and offering those species of business which are smaller, nimbler, more versatile and able to evolve faster and more smartly, the chance to finally emerge from the cindered wastes and take flight.

The travel industry is being forced in to a massive correction as a result of this pandemic, which is inevitably going to be tough for thousands of people. The way it organises, markets, sells and distributes its products will have to change, the businesses that operate in it – the whole industry in fact – will have to be smaller, more streamlined and prepared to embrace different ways to measure ‘success’ that isn’t just profit or bookings growth. The evolutionary bubble that had expanded – with apparently unending potential – for two decades has finally exploded, and part of the recovery effort must be a cold recognition that what had gone before was broken. Bloated businesses, dysfunctional tech, empty brand promises, old boy networks and unsustainably tiny margins had made it an unpleasant, pressurised industry to work in (except for a privileged few), and an often frustrating industry to engage with for customers, where the reality of the product or service didn’t match the promise, and trust was eroded.

So it’s been with increasing despair that we’ve seen article after article that hanker for the way things were, or which are eagerly scanning the horizon for some – any – sign that the old days are returning.

It doesn’t have to be like that anymore. Out of this disaster, new life must emerge.

Wander has deep roots in the travel industry. We’ve worked in it for many years, have many friends within its community, and have shared in its benefits. We mourn the loss of incomes and the threat to good people’s livelihoods that is already happening, fear for the future of many others, and take no pleasure from seeing how these circumstances are exposing just what a fragile house of cards the whole industry had become.

Like many brands with an interest in the travel industry, this year had started well for us. We were working with great candidates, had a growing client list and were forging a strong identity that we felt differentiated us from the identikit recruitment firms and talent agencies out there. But by April that had all changed and we needed to start asking ourselves some questions. Did we want to lay down and accept our fate (and be the business equivalent of those novel little fossils that get dug up occasionally, of extinct species that failed Nature’s rigorous A/B testing regime), and if not, how must we adapt to survive the new business landscape that will emerge?

As the weeks have passed we’ve become increasingly excited about the prospects for change in the travel industry, and elsewhere, and for the collective experience we have had this Spring to be the catalyst.

For all of the difficulty and discomfort, this lockdown period of enforced hibernation has allowed us to look at and learn from other sectors, and talk to many different innovators who share our conviction that there is a different way of doing things. We desperately hope the travel industry does the same as it plots a way in to a post-COVID world, but for Wander it’s been an inspirational experience. In the coming weeks we’ll share the details of how it’s changed our perspective and the direction we’re travelling. The meteor has struck. It’s time to start over.