Silvana Polo, Operations Manager at Beachcomber Tours; Vanessa De Stefano, General Manager of Reservations at Thompsons Holidays; Debbie Joubert, Managing Director of Sure Travel 24-7; Lizanne Crouch, Key Accounts Manager at Giltedge Travel
There are some memories we would rather not revisit. For many of us, COVID-19 is one of them. It was painful, frightening and, for some, deeply traumatic, so there is a very understandable desire to put it behind us and move on. But as the world keeps spinning and we continue to face new challenges, there is value in looking back, even if only for a brief moment.
This period in our history gifted us the rare benefit of hindsight. Through ASATA’s sector-wide COVID-19 response and recovery advocacy, we saw what happened behind the scenes as the systems our industry relied on stopped working and the future became impossible to predict. Now, as ASATA celebrates its 70th anniversary and opens its archives, we can revisit that period through the first-hand accounts of the members who lived through it.
Some of the industry’s professionals have graciously agreed to share what those days actually felt like from the inside. Not the polished version or the recovery story, but the chaos, fear, absurdity and impossible decisions that may just resonate – and hopefully remind us what we’re all capable of.
“The borders are closing. What do we do?”
For Silvana Polo, Operations Manager at Beachcomber Tours, the moment everything changed is etched in her memory. “I remember very clearly where I was. We were actually at home playing a game of cards when I got this panic call from Mauritius saying the borders are closing.”
At first, the words hardly seemed to make sense to her: “Okay, the borders are closing, but what do we do? Do clients go to the airport? Don’t they go to the airport? What actually happens?”
It was 19 March 2020, just as the Easter school holidays were approaching. Silvana and her senior managers started pulling lists and calling clients due to leave the following day, trying to stop them from going to the airport. “What do you say to our clients?… we had no answers during that period. All we knew was that we were in for a roller coaster of a ride.”
Mauritius ultimately went into lockdown for 18 months, including a second lockdown after the country had briefly reopened to South Africans in October 2021.
Silvana emphasises how the second lockdown was, in some ways, even harder. “Everybody was starting to live life again. There was normality. You know, people realised that they were getting salaries again.” Then, on 26 November, Silvana received a call: “Bad news is coming. The South Africans are not going to be allowed in.” She had to deliver the news to her team while her managing director at the time, Terry Monroe, was flying to Australia. “He was still in the air,” she says. “He didn’t even realise what was going on. And when he landed, I had to say to him, ‘Well, Terry, we’re back in lockdown.'”
The same uncertainty was being felt across South Africa’s travel industry. Vanessa De Stefano, General Manager of Reservations at Thompsons Holidays, remembers how the crisis initially seemed almost manageable. “It started off as three weeks. We were closing our office. We let everybody go home for three weeks, because it should be about three weeks.” Three weeks became a year and more, and the reality of retrenchments began to hit. “It was scary and no one ever has the intention of letting staff go, right? But it soon became a reality… and it was devastating. Let’s be real. It was devastating.”
Vanessa recalls meeting someone whose sister had worked in a travel agency and started selling children’s books online during COVID. The business grew into children’s furniture and other products, and eventually the agency closed altogether. “She’d managed to create a whole other business out of it and travel just wasn’t it anymore.” The result was a huge loss of experience for the industry. “We experienced total brain drain in our industry,” Vanessa says.
Debbie Joubert, Managing Director of Sure Travel 24-7, estimates that around 10 to 15 years’ worth of trained consultant knowledge was lost. “About 15 years’ worth of knowledge was instantly gone. And it’s going to take us a long time to get all of that knowledge back.”
When the bizarre became normal
For Debbie, the first warning came in a doctor’s office. She had bronchitis about ten days before South Africa went into lockdown when her doctor told her to send her staff home. “The doctor just looked at me and he said to me, ‘Okay, go home, tell all your staff to pack their stationery and whatever it is that they’re going to need, because this country is going into lockdown very soon.'” When she told her team, they were incredulous. “‘Really? You’re sending us home to work?’ And I said, ‘Well, so the doctor says.'” Ten days later, they were working remotely.
Then came stranded travellers, cancelled flights, closed borders and refund battles, but some situations were far more personal. Debbie was nominated by the South African Embassy in Dublin to act as their agent through one of her clients. On one KLM flight from Dublin via Amsterdam to Johannesburg were three young adults who had each lost their mother within the previous 48 hours. She was responsible for arranging their return home.
“When I was doing the pre-seating and the check-in, it was like, do I put them all together or do I separate them, knowing the anguish they’re going through?… it sort of brought things to reality. Yes, you were hearing of one death or two deaths, but here I had three people who had all lost a parent within 48 hours.”
For Rachael Penaluna, Managing Director of Sure Maritime Travel, one of the hardest moments involved a long-standing client whose mother was gravely ill and dying in the UK. The client begged her to find a way to get there. “I simply couldn’t make it happen. I have never felt more utterly helpless in my entire career.”
At the same time, Rachael was trying to keep her own business alive. Eleven colleagues had to be retrenched and she eventually found herself running the company alone. “Overnight, I had to become accounting, PR, sales, management, and a full-time travel consultant all at once.” She had to relearn complex ticketing and refund processes she had not used for years. “Thank God for the Amadeus learning hub; I had to retrain for my job from scratch, under immense pressure and in complete isolation.”
No timeline, no certainty
For an industry built around precision and planning, the uncertainty was brutal. “I think the most frightening thing for me was that there was no standard. If a country decided it was closing, it closed overnight,” Rachael says. “You’ve got to be a control freak. Everything has to be right. If it’s not right, it’s wrong. And to have this kind of limbo was absolutely terrifying.”
For Lizanne Crouch, Key Accounts Manager at Giltedge Travel, the fear wasn’t only operational. It was financial. Overnight, the company was left looking at “a zero revenue stream” while still carrying responsibility for clients’ money tied up across airlines, hotels and suppliers. “The money is in the chain somewhere and it’s not in our bank. It’s absolutely terrifying.” As companies began collapsing, advisors were left trying to recover whatever funds they could. “There was enormous loss on every front at that time,” she recalls. “The speed with which the borders closed created logistical nightmares. They were literally worthy of a horror movie.”
That uncertainty spilled into one of the biggest battles of the pandemic: refunds. To travellers, the question seemed simple: I paid for my holiday. Why can’t I have my money back? Behind the scenes, the answer was far more complicated. “At the end of the day, if they had refunded, everybody would have collapsed. There would have been a total collapse globally,” Vanessa explains.
Instead, suppliers, advisors and airlines had to work together to keep the industry alive. Hotels agreed to carry credits forward and extend validity, while Silvana says they also worked to protect clients from price increases. “We knew that if we didn’t work with them, we would have a bigger problem.”
The crisis fundamentally changed relationships. “We all had to get on the same page,” Vanessa says. Silvana agrees: “Tell us the story, tell us what you need, and let us see what we can help you with.”
It also created an unexpected sense of community. WhatsApp groups connected advisors across companies and consortiums, with contacts, regulations, airline updates and solutions shared freely. Debbie describes one group with almost 600 members: “Someone’s got your back.” Looking back, she believes those relationships became one of the industry’s greatest strengths. “There are so many agents who work together. No matter whether you’re part of one consortium or another, they are there to help each other.”
ASATA had the trade’s back
While consultants like Silvana, Vanessa, Debbie and Rachael were living the crisis one client at a time, ASATA was living it too, just from a different desk. The question was the same for everyone: how do you keep people safe and informed when nobody, not even government, seemed to have firm answers?
Within days of the National State of Disaster being declared, ASATA launched a dedicated coronavirus website, coronavirus.asata.co.za, pulling supplier updates, regulations and official guidance together in one place. For a trade that was overwhelmed and, frankly, scared, it became a lifeline: one page members could check instead of chasing rumours on WhatsApp or refreshing government sites that changed without warning.
According to Otto de Vries, ASATA’s CEO, ASATA worked through each new government notice as it landed and turned it into plain guidance the trade could actually use. “We ran a series of webinars to help members get through the crisis together, including a ‘Dealing with Refunds and Cancellations’ session that tackled one of the hardest conversations consultants were having every single day. This was followed by a detailed FAQ, so nobody had to remember every answer on the spot.”
Behind the scenes, ASATA lobbied government directly for the industry’s survival. It requested stimulus support and relief measures for businesses staring down, as Lizanne describes it, “a zero revenue stream”. It pushed for fair, workable refund and voucher policies so travellers had a genuine choice and travel businesses had a fighting chance of surviving the wait. It later backed the industry’s vaccination drive so borders could reopen for good. None of it happened quickly, and none of it happened quietly.
Looking back now, De Vries remembers the people. “What stays with me is how quickly an industry that competes every day for the same clients turned around and started helping each other instead,” he reflects. “Nobody had a playbook. We were all figuring it out together, agency by agency, phone call by phone call. That’s what I’m proudest of when I look back on that period. Not that we survived it, but how we survived it, together.”
It is, in many ways, the same thing every consultant on these pages describes: an industry that leaned on each other because there was no other way through.
When clients realised what an advisor was worth
Before COVID-19, the value of a travel advisor could sometimes be difficult to explain. People could book flights online, compare hotel prices and build their own itineraries. Then the world closed, and suddenly the difficult part wasn’t making the booking. It was getting home, understanding changing regulations, knowing whether a border was open and figuring out what would happen to money already paid.
“Clients have realised that there comes a bump in the road where you can’t do it yourself,” Debbie says. During COVID, advisors became ‘COVID experts’, scanning news websites and international health information to stay one step ahead. “Those clients have remained loyal now. They keep coming back because they know how important it is to have a travel agent on your side.”
That personal connection has remained. Debbie now gives every client a WhatsApp group so that if someone is stuck somewhere, they can call or message and one of the team will be available. “They’re all saying how reassuring it is to know that there’s somebody there with them. You know, it just makes travel less scary.” Silvana saw the same shift: “When things go wrong, that is when you need that advisor. That is when you need the experience and the knowledge,” she adds.
What we carry forward
For Silvana, the biggest lesson is simple: “Nothing is impossible. Absolutely nothing… when things go wrong, you need to understand what has happened and look for a solution… and sometimes it’s not just your solution, it’s the solution to assist others.”
She emphasises how many of the systems introduced during COVID-19 worked so well that Beachcomber kept them, while the experience also changed the way the company communicated with staff.
For Debbie, the lesson is preparedness and relationships. “You never know what is about to hit. You have to always be prepared for any pandemic or anything that may happen.” But she also came away with a stronger sense of professional identity: “We are professionals. Yes, we may not have that doctorate or whatever other professionals do, but we have a world full of knowledge that we’ve developed over many years.”
Perhaps that is what COVID revealed most clearly. The expertise was always there; the crisis made it impossible to overlook.
ASATA’s 70-year history is, in many ways, a history of change. Technology has transformed the way we book, consumer behaviour has shifted, and the way people research, buy and experience travel has evolved repeatedly. But COVID was different. It temporarily removed travel itself. There were no holidays to sell, no journeys to plan, and no certainty about what tomorrow would bring. There was only the next phone call, the next stranded traveller, the next border closure and the next impossible question.
And yet, in that extraordinary period, the essential humanity of the travel profession became clearer than ever. People shared information, negotiated, picked up the phone, helped competitors, protected clients, and protected one another. They retrained themselves, worked from dining room tables, found new businesses when their old ones disappeared, and endured devastating losses while still opening their laptops the next morning. Eventually, people travelled again.
As ASATA looks back across 70 years, perhaps that is one of the most valuable things the archives can give us: not a record of what happened, but a reminder of what people are capable of when everything changes. We cannot predict the next crisis, but we have been there before. We know that uncertainty can be navigated, that relationships matter, and that expertise matters when the usual systems stop working.