Tourism and hospitality that once occupied billions of economic outputs every year was blown seriously by the COVID-19 outbreak. The slow of domestic and international interactions has drained the tourism and hospitality industries' customer flows greatly. Millions of practitioners are struggling for crisis remission. Though scholars have noted the plight of the hospitality industry, most previous studies have focused on the pandemic effects on the hospitality industry in the short run. Few have investigated the whole industry's long-term sustainability under the pandemic, which is increasingly important as the pandemic is going beyond expected. This chapter aims to explore measures and innovations that help hotels recover from pandemic shock and develop long-term sustainability during the outbreak. Based on the framework of Clauss T, the author studied the business model and innovation of the Chinese hotel industry in the post-pandemic era by integrating the importance of hygiene upgrades, local market expansion, and stakeholder management to the industry.
TopIntroduction
Hospitality has long been considered a significant component of tourism and a major impetus of its development. In his study on tourism, Lugosi, P. (2021) identified multiple ways that hospitality and tourism intersect, including socioeconomic & socio-technological practices and human encounters. A considerable amount of literature has revealed a positive relationship between hospitality and tourism quality, satisfaction, and sustainability (Jones & Wynn, 2019; Pavić et al., 2019; Mansour & Ariffin, 2016; Sadeh & Garkaz, 2018). Additionally, from the perspective of the overall economy, the hospitality industry stimulates economic growth through jobs, poverty relief, etc. as well (Fotiadis et al., 2019; Dogru et al., 2020; Toerien, 2020). Much past research has shown a high correlation in growth between the hospitality industry and the economy (Luo, 2012; Li, 2020). As of 2020, Chinese turnover in hospitality (Figure 1) and national revenue from tourism (Figure 2) have been increasing for years, indicating a great market vitality and outlook.
Figure 1. Chinese hospitality’s yearly turnover (in billion yuan)
Figure 2. China's revenue from tourism from 2008 to 2019 (in billion yuan)
However, the outbreak of COVID-19 has been impacting the Chinese tourism and hospitality industries strongly. The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 hindered normal tourism and business activities, followed by drops in the hotel occupancy rate (OCC) and income. For hotels that have debt burdens or greatly rely on cash flow, the blow of the outbreak is fatal. Despite the fact the COVID-19 outbreak in mainland China has been under control with no large-scale re-outbreak after April 2020, some small regional outbreaks occurred because of the continuing international epidemic. For both Chinese and international hospitality industries, the market uncertainty and instability brought by the COVID-19 epidemic are still lasting, even nearly two years after its outbreak in early 2020.
Under this unprecedented challenge, there is an urge to have a comprehensive understanding of the current situation and investigate corresponding management and transformation ways. To date, several studies have been focused on the hospitality industry in the era of COVID-19. Several previous research, as which conducted by Jones &Comfort (2020), has identified the influence of the COVID-19 epidemic on hospitality from different sides (Hao et al., 2020; Wieczorek-Kosmala, 2021). Furtherly, some analysts have attempted to explore COVID-19 management frameworks and other crisis coping principles and strategies such as artificial intelligence utilization and business model innovation (Breier et al., 2021; Pillai et al., 2021). On the other side, several discussions have also been presented from the views of stakeholders, like consumers and employees. Research by Hu et al., (2021) revealed changes in consumers’ perception of hotels services under the epidemic. Simultaneously, as one of the most important links in hotel service provision, employees and their views on the epidemic have also attracted the attention of many scholars (Bajrami et al., 2021; Park et al., 2020; Yan et al., 2021).