Covid-19 Impacts and Coping Strategies for Hospitality Industry

Dr. Emily Ma from HTM department and her colleagues conducted a study on the impacts of Covid-19 on the industry.  Their study examined how two hotels in Oklahoma City had coped with challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, from day-to-day operations, health and safety measures to marketing, human resources and cost-saving strategies.

Under the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. hotel occupancy rates, ADR, and RevPAR respectively decreased to 39.4%, $110.66, and $43.54 in March, then continuously dropped to 24.5%, $73.23, and $17.93 in April, and rebounded to 33.1%, $79.57, and $26.35 in May.

The study found good practices that are valuable during the pandemic as well as in everyday hotel operations:

• Maintaining financial sustainability is the most important task for hotels to survive the pandemic.
• The health and safety of customers and employees should be the priority of hotels. Some examples that were applied in hotels include technology-enabled contactless check-in and check-out procedures, which are also efficient and help saving labor costs, text-messaging the front desk for service instead of talking to employees in person to minimize face-to-face contact, and Disinfecting rooms and air-conditioning units with medical-grade disinfectant.
• It is important that hotels develop strong operational protocols as well as strategical plans to survive extreme crises like the COVID-19 outbreak. It is important for hotels to analyze the strengths and weakness of each market segment, assess their resiliency to crises and have a healthy mix of market segments, so that if one or two segments under-perform, hotels can still rely on others.

The complete article can be found at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278431921000025