Interview with Cédric Fraissinet, General Manager - Switzerland & Italy at International SOS

What is your role at International SOS and how must I imagine your daily tasks? 

I’m General Manager at International SOS in charge our Swiss and Italian businesses. The role of International SOS in Switzerland is to help employers in protecting their workforce from health and security risks. It consists of advising on occupational health and security strategies, facilitating the implementation of risk mitigation measures such as situational monitoring, threat tracking, staff training and provision of information to employees or organization’s management. Medical and security assistance to travelers and assignees is as well a significant part of our activity. We do support a large variety of organizations : most of the NGOs and IGOs HQed in Switzerland, quite a few universities and private schools, the majority of multinational corporations based in our country but as well an even larger number of Small & Medium size companies.

How has International SOS been helping its customers in this complicated year?

The COVID-19 pandemic is driving a fundamental change in the health & security support we provided to our clients. Though the number of travels has obviously dropped, most of our clients still need some of their employees to go abroad. Important to mention that International Business Travel is still possible despite COVID-19 and the obvious complexity of the organisation of such journey. Our role consists of enabling these movements and empowering our client staff to travel safely. We have experienced a dramatic increase in demand for support & information from travellers who tend to call us now 5 times more than last year.We have seen as well a significant increase of requests for information and advices by the management of our clients. The number of calls to our Assistance Centers by managers has been multiplied by 10. 

As a consequence, we have adapted our operational resources, grown our intelligence and analysis resources and enriched our response enablers to stick to the needs clients expressed. Medical and Security assistance became as well much more complex in an environment where all local infrastructures were under the tremendous pressure imposed by COVID-19. Nevertheless leveraging our 26 Assistance Centers across the 5 continents we maintained the same operational level :

We assisted over 33 000 COVID-19 related cases.

We completed TeleConsultation cases in 24 countries.

We operated 30 charters with 1,900 passengers.

We were able to perform over 450 air ambulance movements for COVID-19 patients & other patients, from over 100 countries

As with every crisis there is always a lot of room for innovation coming from an extreme situation. Has the crisis lead to any new products and services that your clients can benefit from? 

Yes, agility and innovation were instrumental skills ! I am extremely proud of what our team managed to achieve in the past very challenging months. 

Following our client’s requests, we rapidly expanded beyond our traveler and assignee proposition, to provide a holistic Workforce Resilience solution. 

COVID-19 made our clients realise that the support to staff was to be consistently managed whatever people are in-country people managers, site-based workers, domestic and international business travelers, international assignees and office/ home based workers.

The response has to be holistic (from blue collar mental health to assignees mass evacuations) and consistent across the entire worldwide workforce. No more silos. Fascinating times during which we work now simultaneously with HR, Corporate Security, Business continuity and Travel managers.  

The scope of our services is now available to any employee of our clients and designed to the specific need of each staff category. The support to management has been as well reinforced with insights and advisory that supports business resilience. We are of course heavily engaged in facilitating business travel resumption, but we support as well the mitigation of COVID-19 and others health risks at the workplace whatever it is company premises or employee’s home.

What is your outlook 2021 like from a business perspective?

COVID-19 is an accelerator ! We expect it to transform our business lives at least as much as September 11 did change permanently the philosophy of security in the business travel environment. 

Health is now a strategic driver on the radar of CEOs. The Human Capital Resilience shall certainly become a major pillar of organisation’s sustainability.

We will carry on expanding our focus on Workforce Resilience to support that strategic agenda. In terms of risk trends for the coming year : I highly recommend to attend our Risk Outlook 2021 online conference on 10th of December. Among other topics discussed by our experts and external thought leaders, we will disclose the result of a Resilience Trends Survey conducted with Ipsos MORI over 1,400 risk professionals across 99 countries. Quite insightful !  LINK

Interview with Andreas Schneider, Head of Kuoni Business Travel Switzerland

Hi Andreas, where do we catch you today? Zurich, Lugano, Geneva? Good question but you forgot to mention Uzwil our newest Location in Switzerland. And the answer for now is none of the above. I am currently in my very own office in my house in Mainz. My hotel of choice in Zurich has decided to close for December and early January due to very low bookings and so I decided to come for a last visit for this year at the end of November. I will be back mid-January and for now work remotely like everybody else. For a quick personal assessment… How many times did you start talking and were still on mute? Probably like everybody else way too many times but apart from this working remotely has given us all a lot of new found agility. Indeed it has. Can you please share some highlights and achievements of this year that you and your team have had and implemented? We started the year off very well with the implementation of NDC for anything that is booked via our Kuoni Online platforms. Kuoni was the first TMC in Switzerland to fully implement this new standard. Of course this was celebrated accordingly. We also implemented a fully automated visa process with Viselio. All our offices can handle this process and thanks to Viselio we can even offer our travellers access to a Covid test. We also completely upgraded our hardware and software to enable carefree working from anywhere. Our staff love the opportunities this creates for them. We have implemented Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Telephony. Any of my colleagues has access to any document ever created at any time via their mobile and their laptop. This is my view on empowerment. This enables a very fluid mix of working from home or working from the office. From an HR perspective this is a fantastic upgrade for our team. This sounds great and makes 2020 a not so bad year after all. Do you have any other topics you would like to share? Indeed I have more news for your readers. One of the first things I noticed when I took over from Serge Bacher was the importance of attention to detail and language. I am very happy to say that we can now offer 24/7 service in German, French and Italian. The main point being „at no extra cost“! Why? We wanted to take emergency topic out of a 24/7 availability. It is no emergency if you need to speak to a consultant after 6pm. It is just a necessity and we are very happy to cater to this necessity. We see it as a service. Thanks to our new and fully connected platforms everybody has access to everything at any time and emails that come in once our offices close for the day are worked on in our new service centre so that our customers get replies in due time regardless of day of the week or time. Wow this is indeed a first! 24/7 at no extra cost. Congratulations! Anything else to share? For now all I can say is that we have a fantastic piece of news that I will be happy to share in the next newsletter. We are testing a new product and the results are making the team very happy. The launch is set for March. I believe that is when your next quarterly newsletter goes out. Am I right? 

Indeed you are. Thanks for catching up. 

Interview with Hugo Martin, Sales Manager, citizenM Switzerland

Good afternoon Hugo. Thanks for finding a few moments for the ASTM. For those members who have not yet experienced your properties in Geneva and Zurich or elsewhere what makes citizenM unique?

We say of ourselves that we provide "business hotels done right". citizenM started with an idea to disrupt the traditional hotel industry by creating a luxury hybrid hotel for today’s modern travellers – eliminating the frustrations these travellers shared. In 2008, we opened our first hotel and designed it around a new type of traveller – one who values a luxury hotel experience in central city locations, but at an affordable price. We offer our guests a living room with books, art and designer furniture. They can enjoy 24/7 food and drinks at our canteenM. We operate cloudM rooftop bars with fantastic cocktails and amazing views and most properties offer societyM creative meeting spaces. To round this all off our friendly ambassadors are always here to support our guests with any wishes they might have. 

You opened a new hotel in Geneva in the middle of a pandemic. How did that go? Obviously normal conditions would have made life a lot easier but one of our central features that we implemented years ago has been a great helper in these complicated times. At all our properties our guests can check in themselves without having to be in touch any of our ambassadors. Our check in booths are cleaned after every check-in and this gives our guests an additional sense of safety. Through our highly appreciated self service concept we became covid proof "by accident". We have had fantastic feedback from our guests on the new Geneva hotel so far and the numbers are picking up as well.   

A lot of hotels have been introducing new offers to generate extra traffic during these complicated times. What about citizenM?

We have indeed designed a smart new option for smart companies. Corporate subscription by citizenM is a seriously clever alternative for all companies with travelling employees. Stop paying those big hotel, office space or co-working bills – we have created the perfect work-sleep-meet-entertain hybrid. The offer consists of: guaranteed 3 nights per month anytime – no blackout dates – at all citizenM hotels worldwide.  3 hours of meeting room use – anytime during the subscription month. A daily workspace in the living room – anytime during the subscription month. Also a free welcome drink is included with each stay. Breakfast is of course also in as is super fast Wi-Fi. The price is a flat fee of 550 EUR per month and user. If you prefer to sort somebody out all year round you can get 12 months at the price of 11. the offer is perfect for your company if your remote workers regularly need to travel to big cities and need a fixed price, work, sleep deal. You will not have to pay for a traditional office space or an expensive co-working subscription. On top if your team members need to meet with their clients we have the meeting spaces covered as well. 

Thanks for the update Hugo. We like the idea very much. We might be calling you soon to negotiate a very special ASTM rate!

Some key achievements for the first year of the ASTM

In October 2019 the ASTM was officially founded in Zurich as a Swiss association under Swiss law. The launching festivities took place in Geneva on December 3rd with a memorable launching event at the Hotel N'vy. With encouraging words from Michel Dieleman, President of our partner association AFTM and great feedback from roughly 30 buyers and suppliers we were happy to make our first steps. We also announced four conferences for 2020. Of course not a single conference could take place.  However 2020 will still go down in ASTM history as a successful first year. Here are some reasons as to why.

Numbers, regions, growth, sectors

> 300 members across all geographies and sectors 

> 500 followers on our LinkedIn page 

Zurich is where we managed to grow most: 28% of our members are located by the Limmat

Geneva is our second hub in Switzerland with 15% of our members

Online, offline, hybrid events

Thanks to 6 webinars that we produced with great support from our partners to make up for a long period of no face to face exchange we have managed to build up a pan-European reach with members in Germany, France, Belgium the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. 

Another fantastic highlight of 2020 certainly was the hybrid event that we produced together with our partner citizenM to celebrate the opening of their Geneva hotel. While ASTM members were onsite they were all in the safety of their room and the event was streamed through the hotel and across Europe. We have developed more ideas along these lines and there should be more news on this coming very soon. 

We would again like to thank citizenM for this opportunity and our panelists Frederic Claus, Manager Administration Services, Global Fund, Nathalie Ansermoz, Senior EMEA Travel Manager, Parker, Peter Grover, Managing Director, TRIPBAM, Marion Dargaud, Meetings and Events specialist, EY,  Virginie Rouault, Manager Sales, citizenM for their contribution. An extra special thank you goes out to our moderator Marc Zuber , Global Travel Category Head, Nestlé.

Governance, innovation and more brain power

It is also with great joy that we can announce the Advisory Board with buyers Marc Zuber (Nestlé), Nathalie Ansermoz (Parker), Reto Keller (Uefa) and three more colleagues to be announced shortly. The Industry Circle is set up  with Andreas Schneider (Kuoni Business Travel), Virginie Rouault (citizenM) with new industry figures set to join very soon.

Year end, welcome 2021

Thanks to a vaccine which will be available very soon there has most recently been a pick up on air travel. Lufthansa Group reported sales are up by 400% week over week. At the same time Carsten Spohr announced that all of Lufthansa Group's key corporate clients are reporting a high level of "catch-up" travel just waiting to happen. In a call today with the ASTM a procurement director from a global pharmaceutical leader confirmed the same. 

With all of this in mind we again would like to thank you for your support, wish you a safe winter break and an optimistic start into 2021. 

Stay safe!

Sabah Kahoul, Dominic Short

ASTM Leadership Team