Latest posts by Martin Moodie (see all)
- How I overcame Severe Tire Damage to become the oldest influencer in town - April 20, 2024
- Free as a (Kiwi) bird and flying high in Haikou - April 13, 2024
- Discovering Food Accademia’s world of fine flavours at a Hong Kong cha chaan teng - April 6, 2024
Remember our table that ranked the most used travel retail words of 2019 and compared them with those of ten years earlier? It doesn’t take us to tell you that the most-used ones in 2020 will be the ‘c’ words: coronavirus, COVID-19 and crisis.
But there’s another, more positive one. Zoom. How many of us are now conducting ‘face to face’ meetings of a different kind via the brilliant technology? Here below is the great team at inflight retail specialist Retail in Motion (courtesy of Senior Manager Global Boutique Development Joe Harvey on LinkedIn), taking part in one of their regular new-format meetings. “Great teams are what rocks companies and at Retail in Motion this team are the business – super proud of every one of them,” says Joe.
The Moodie Davitt team does just the same. This week we had the sad duty of saying a temporary farewell to our ‘Furloughed Four’ – a quality quartet of our team members who will take a break from their regular duties for up to three months under the UK government’s business assistance package (they receive 80% of their salaries to a certain cap).
The occasion became a little less sad though as we used Zoom to host a cocktail hour, which descended into hilarity thanks to the wonders of video and image-enhanced backdrops.
All those who are staying on during the biggest trading challenge our company – like the industry – has ever faced, agreed it is our collective responsibility to ‘Free the Furloughed Four’ from government assistance and get them back to where they are desperately needed. Perversely, you see, at a time when revenue is drying up, we have never been busier as the traffic table below shows. Record traffic. Not words you would expect to utter, and we are cautious in expressing the fact. But true nonetheless.
Last night we hosted the first-ever Virtual Wine O’Clock (report to follow). Thanks to the wonders of Zoom we were able to talk (and drink wine) with 70 industry executives around the world, including Delhi, Dubai, Dublin, New York, Hamburg, Singapore, Veneto and all over continental Europe. Some great wines were ‘shared’ and some great, and often very moving, stories told. Wine – and Zoom – ensured that while we might be isolated, we are not alone.
