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The global travel restrictions that were brought in as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic forced the tourism sector to take drastic action. In Switzerland, this meant not just redundancies: some businesses had to close for good, despite generous short-time working rules and emergency loans. In this difficult environment, Switzerland Tourism ST as the national tourism marketing organisation assumed responsibility, concentrating on three core areas: promoting cohesion within the sector and supporting political assistance measures, stepping up cooperation and reducing its own headcount.
Testing instead of quarantine
The travel restrictions and quarantine rules put many foreign visitors off taking their holidays in Switzerland. To avoid further job losses within tourism, ST advocated strongly for “Testing instead of quarantine” together with representatives of the tourism, travel and aviation sectors.
There were calls for more testing instead of putting visitors into quarantine. Anyone testing negative would be exempted from quarantine, with rapid tests introduced as quickly as possible for incoming visitors.
Stepping up communications
2020 was an unprecedented year. The whole world found itself in “trial and error” mode. Protective measures and travel restrictions changed constantly and were hard to predict.
At this time of uncertainty and increasing disorientation, communication grew in importance. The industry and the public needed timely, clear and reliable information. For its members, ST used the STnet platform with the comprehensive Covid-19 section. This included information such as the Covid-19 update, which between January and June evolved into the most important tourist information platform, with more than 30 articles in three languages. There was also the ST Industry Call, the internal sector dialogue, the latest entry requirements (in German), information on the “Clean & Safe” campaign and the Covid-19 communication principles(in German).
On MySwitzerland.com/open, ST provided information on the safety concepts and travel restrictions in six languages. Through its intensive media relations work, ST also positioned itself as an opinion leader in the public eye.
Human resources measures at Switzerland Tourism
As a semi-public entity, ST’s main purpose is to promote Switzerland as a whole – this is all the more important at times of crisis when individual tourism service suppliers are not in a position to do so. At the same time, ST also felt a responsibility to introduce reduction measures in relation to its human resources. This included, for example, approving an internal recruitment freeze, reducing the number of posts through natural staff turnover (ten permanent positions cut by the end of 2020) and requiring overtime and annual leave to be taken by the end of the year.
In order to cope with the increased workload in certain areas, ST created the internal job platform “ST Team Support”. This provided a simple and transparent way to make duties visible to ST employees in other departments or markets who have spare capacity. The “Tourism for Tourism” project launched in autumn 2020 then went somewhat further: ST made vacant positions in its head office teams temporarily available to employees of tourism partners throughout Switzerland, which enabled various gaps to be filled.
At the same time, ST followed the recommendation of the Federal Council and enabled all employees to work from home again during the “slowdown” from October 2020 onwards. Anyone who nevertheless wanted to work from the office was able to do so while rigorously observing the extensive protective measures. All of these measures were aimed at not over-stretching employees.
