What’s going on in Mendoza?
Of course, the Covid-19 surprised us as well as everyone else worldwide. In late February we saw that the pandemic would affect us as well, but we didn’t know how much that would be yet since the ONWTO was still saying that travel wouldn’t be a problem. Probably that was still too soon to see that we were entering into the wildest pandemic of the century. In that context, earlier than any government decision, we immediately decided to send our team everyone, and keep working safe.
In March all the booking pending for the rest of the 1st half of the 2020 were chain cancelled. We passed from being in a record season to have no passengers at all. Believe me, that was really sad.
What do we have to do now?
That was the first question we made ourselves. It took us some time to understand the real situation. When would travel start again? A couple of months? next year? How would we survive while we wait? A lot of questions but no answers at all.
The first thing we saw clearly it was that we had to keep our team together. We set two weekly team meetings to keep close, stay together and go on with this weird time looking after the huge group we are.
That brought to SAK great results. For the first time we were able to open our minds, bring new ideas and introduce to the organisation a little bit of everyone desires.
Let’s make a deep transformation
We proposed our team to develop a transforming period and start looking at every process we do to attend our guests. We decided to convert from a well organised company to a professionally organised travel company. We decided to go deeply into the sustainability process we opened last year in 2019 and go forward as much as we can. We’ll have news very soon about all this. We hope soon we can tell you more about this.
The most important thing for us, is to let our passengers and partners know that we are working harder than ever. When we are back, we’ll be better, our wine tours will be safer, and we’ll be making good stuff to keep the planet clean and more natural.
Best regards, and keep yourself safe to look after the others.
Nico Iemolo. Co-Founder
