Hospitality Today – From Medical Crisis to Reopening
Now more than two months after the Coronavirus pandemic caused businesses to shutter amidst shelter-in-place orders across the world, the hotel industry continues to be on the front lines of this crisis. Wildly beleaguered by the immediate cessation of travel and notably of service in the public health efforts to slow the spread of the virus, as we outlined in the PKF hotelexperts March newsletter, hospitality continues to navigate a complex set of factors. Despite the Covid-19 crisis, and the precipitous drop of group travel to near zero occupancy by week ending March 21, 2020, room nights have continued to be in some demand. While a dramatic loss from the roughly 3.5 million room nights sold per day in the US last year, “the U.S. hotel industry sells a million room nights each night, no matter what” according to Jan Freitag, Senior Vice President at Smith Travel Research who explains in a May 12 Hotel News Now article that, “because of the first-responders, homeless populations, people driving across country, airline crews and people actually living in hotels, we now know that there is a base level of demand that never goes away, no matter the economic situation.”
Written by
Channing Henry and Alisher Nazir
PKF hotelexperts, May 2020