I own a travel business. Since 2012. It's not going well right now, thanks to COVID-19 and the related closures, cancellations, and restrictions.
Lots of businesses are going under, and lots of those are travel-related. I honestly can't count the number of cruise line and tour company staff members that have been furloughed or laid off altogether. It's awful out there.
Travel business/businesses going under isn't about "people may travel later" or "people can't travel right now" or "things will get better."
When it's YOUR BUSINESS and it starts to go under, it's mostly about this: you spent 8+ years of your life on this. You learned. You trained. You networked. You invested (time and money.) You built it from literally nothing into something. Something tangible. Something moderately profitable. Something you are proud of.
To lose ALL OF THAT in the course of 5 months is - to put it plainly - devastating. Not only are you not making money, but the prospect of any sort of recovery is dim at best. What time you DO spend working now is to try to take care of people who are either cancelling or were cancelled, which in most cases you will not be paid for. Not paid for the work you did - not paid for the work you are still doing.
It feels like building a house from scratch and then watching it burn down. It feels like failure, like losing a battle, like lost and wasted time and effort.
It's not just business - it's personal. It's personal to me, and it's personal to the tens of dozens of amazing, hard-working people I know in the industry.
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