When you run a seasonal tourism business, you don’t have to recoup the income later.
Colleen Stephens, president of Stan Stephens Glacier & Wildlife Cruises in Valdez, Alaska, grew up with that knowledge. His parents, Stan and Mary Helen, founded the company in 1971. In 1978, Stephens and his two sisters were working alongside their parents, introducing travelers to the wildlife and glaciers of Prince William Sound.
When the coronavirus epidemic began to spread last winter, Stephens watched closely to see how it could end up affecting Alaska’s short tourist season. The company, which has three other full-time employees and a team of seasonal employees, all from the city of Valdez (population 4,000), normally sends day cruises between mid-May and mid-September. It’s just four months to get a year’s revenue from the company’s two 149-passenger ships. About 75% of daytime cruise passengers come from outside of Alaska.
Fortune spoke with Stephens for a new series, The Coronavirus Economy, to find out how the pandemic is navigating for his business and his team. The following questions and answers have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
As of mid-February, we were still trending higher than last year. People still had that confidence to travel. Things were looking great with contract work too. Because the Alaska Marine Highway [the state’s ferry system] is down in Prince William Sound [due to the state’s financial problems and necessary repairs on the old fleet], we had some rental jobs. We had a five-day letter in which we took 200 children and their entire band team to Córdoba. We needed to get the necessary crew to make that trip.
For all that, we were thinking of sending ships a month earlier than we normally would. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.
That next Monday. It was literally over the weekend that we stopped looking at things on the booking site and started to see that it was all coming from the cancellation side.
We saw companies beginning to reposition cruise ships in places that may not have had the infection at the time, and suddenly they looked at the whole world as a place to consider.
Alaska relies heavily on our cruise companies and cruise partners. As they started to adjust things for cruise ships and land, that is starting to affect people, even if they don’t have a port of call. Those [travelers] still roam our state. You could follow the trend of cancellations as to which country was having spikes.
The other thing we saw a few weeks later was that all of our tour operator partners came to us for help. They were trying to get people to rebook instead of canceling. We were asked to shorten the cancellation deadlines and adapt to your needs. We decided that if they were going to ask for it, we were going to give it to them.
It always changes. There is nothing concrete yet, which I think is the challenge for any seasonal operator in Alaska or anywhere.
I don’t think anyone wants to start moving people until it is safe for the communities and for the guests. Nobody really wants to pressure him. Many people hope for all they can and are adapting as we see changes in our country and around the world.
I was on a conference call with other tourism people and some said, “Well, when is this going to end?” And if we’re still in a place of social distancing, we can’t even take our capacity. We do not know.
My theory, when all this started to fall apart, was that the more communication the better, with the employees, our tourist partners, the bank. What we start to do is, every Friday, send an email to our employees. Because of their ages, I have to text everyone and tell them an email is coming.
Two of us who work full time gave all of our personal phone numbers, and nearly 50% of the staff contacted us for guidance and resources.
We also ask them for information, so that when we look at the different aid packages we know what they need.
Many of the Friday emails begin with: “We don’t know anything new, but here is some other information we want to share.” We send them information from the CDC or from the community or other government agencies, reminding them to protect themselves so that we can be healthy and on the sidelines at some point.
