Coronavirus question for online travel firms: To refund or not?

Online booking sites and owners of Airbnb listings must decide how to treat travelers who prefer not to travel.

As the spread of COVID-19 to more than 100,000 cases worldwide injects fear into travel plans, the chaos is putting to the test refund policies not only of major airlines and hotels but online booking sites.

Hotels typically allow customers to cancel reservations. Some airlines are being accommodating amid the coronavirus outbreak and issuing waivers as they face a steep drop in business in what is shaping up as the industry’s worst crisis since the September 2001 terrorist attacks, some experts say. Now the question is how online booking sites and owners of Airbnb listings are going to treat travelers in coming days and weeks who prefer not to travel.

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Are businesses really ready to go remote? We’re about to find out.

Enterprise software companies have earned billions of dollars in revenue by promising to help their customers create the digital workplace of the future. We’re about to find out if the business world is ready for that future.

Thanks to panic over the coronavirus outbreak, dozens of major conferences have been canceled in recent weeks, and several huge companies — Amazon, Microsoft and Chevron — have asked employees to forgo most business travel and work from home. That means lots of people accustomed to doing business face to face — whether through sales calls or managing their employees — will have to depend entirely on digital collaboration tools such as video conferencing and messaging apps.

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Πηγή: protocol.com