You can’t furlough an elephant: How Laos’ ECC is surviving the COVID crisis
What would you do if revenues dried up but you had dozens of elephants to look after? The Elephant Conservation Center (ECC) in Sayaboury, Laos faced this situation as COVID-19 lockdowns and travel bans bit in March 2020. ECC founding partner Sébastien Duffillot shares what they did.
It’s a “Good Tourism” Insight. [Thanks to “GT” Destination Partner We Are Lao for inviting Mr Duffillot to write a “GT” Insight.]
The tourism industry has been particularly badly hit by the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic since March 2020. For many operators it has meant bankruptcy or at least freezing operations and furloughing staff.
The situation has highlighted the fact that tourism — a non-essential activity — is an industry that is hit both first and hardest in a global crisis. It has exposed the travel & tourism industry’s fragility, relying as it does on the freedom of people to travel.
A tourism sector with which I am very familiar, and which is popular among many visitors to Southeast Asia, is elephant tourism.
In this post I will describe the steps we at the Elephant Conservation Center of Laos (ECC) have taken since the start of the pandemic.
Our experience has been very different to those of most tourism businesses, including hotels, resorts, and restaurants. The main point of difference is that we are currently in charge of 30 elephants.
Live animals under human care cannot be furloughed nor made redundant. And neither can their caretakers.
This means that for an organisation like ours that used to employ 70 staff before the pandemic, we could suspend jobs for only 30 of them. After about a year without visitors, we had the difficult job of asking all personnel associated with the hospitality part of our business — tour guides, drivers, housekeepers — to leave the company.
Our team of 24 mahouts, however… continue reading this “GT” Insight in full and for free. There are many like it at The “Good Tourism” Blog.
