During a recent webinar with Destinations International, Miles Partnership Senior Vice Presidents Laura Libby and Nate Huff shared key insights for how travel industry businesses can best message to key audiences—while measuring impact and engagement—during these unprecedented times.

Their advice? Take a “messaging” versus a “marketing” approach to create a holistic, fluid strategy with consumers that leans into storytelling and creates value for your partners. Start by creating a plan that focuses on what your organization can be doing now, while setting yourself up for continued evolution. Establish your message points, create plans to share them, set a new baseline and start measuring the progress of your efforts. A phased approach will create space to react to shifting circumstances in real time.

Five key recommendations include:

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The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, is creating a cascading series of unprecedented challenges for the tourism industry and wider economy. Rapidly changing events, the complexity of the issues involved plus the natural human emotion of fear are creating a hugely demanding environment for tourism leaders.  Here are eight principles to help guide your decisions and provide practical information to government and industry partners as well as your wider community.

1. Facts Not Fear – Amplify expert, independent information.

Understandably there is a lot of concern and yes, fear, about the health and economic consequences of COVID-19.  It is important to recognize and empathize with these feelings but also focus on expert, government-led health and economic/business advice. This includes highlighting official advice from...