Highlights

Abstract

Keywords

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Methodology

۳٫ Findings

۳٫۱٫ Phase 1: pre-event and early symptom

۳٫۲٫ Phase 2: emergency

۳٫۳٫ Phase 3: crisis

۳٫۴٫ Phase 4: recovery

۳٫۵٫ Phase 5: resolutions

۴٫ Toward a refined pandemic crisis management framework for the hotel sector

۵٫ Conclusion & future research

References

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has long-lasting impacts that require the hotel sector to revise, innovate and transform their businesses. However, the literature related to this area remains vastly under-developed. Based on 219 articles collected from global news media and an integrated crisis management framework, this research note map out “strategic responses” from the hotel sector and suggest implications for hotels to address the evolving pandemic situation. Three modifications were proposed to refine and further develop a pandemic crisis management framework.

۱٫ Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has seriously disrupted the hotel sector with a projected loss outweighing all previous crises combined, including the 9/11 terrorism attack, 2008 recession or SARS epidemic (Oxford Economics, 2020). The average revenue-per-available-room (RevPAR) fell by nearly 90 % in the second quarter of 2020 and is forecasted to continuously decline due to travel bans and tourists’ fear of being stranded (Courtney, 2020). There is thus an urgent need for practical guiding frameworks that could assist the hotel sector in becoming more resilient during and after the pandemic.

Although there exists a growing body of literature on crisis management, the current models tend to suggest a “one size fits all” approach, often overlooking the fact that crises vary largely in duration, scale and impacts (Speakman and Sharpley, 2012). Besides being more tourism-focused (as opposed to hospitality-focused), these models are also mainly conceptual, rarely tested empirically and do not propose practical strategies to address specific crisis such as a global pandemic (Ritchie and Jiang, 2019). This research note, therefore, seeks to initiate discussions towards the development of a more practical and refined pandemic crisis management framework for the hotel sector. Utilizing global news media sources, strategic responses of hotels are collected, analyzed and mapped out via an integrated strategic crisis management model (Ritchie, 2004; Wang and Ritchie, 2011). The note thus also makes practical contributions by identifying “strategic responses” that have been adopted by the hotel sector in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.