The global hospitality industry has been through every perceivable calamity over the past decades: earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, major floods, terrorist attracts like 9/11, SARS, global recessions, epidemics and pandemics like SARS, MERSA, ZIKA, swine flu and now COVID-19. After each crisis, the industry came roaring back and I believe it will recover very quickly after the current COVID-19 crisis and will prosper like never before.

Naturally, each region and destination has had and will have its own decline and rebound curves as far as hotel occupancy, ADRs and RevPARs are concerned. Recovery post-COVID-19 will also be unique to each region, destination and property and will greatly depend on a) the underlying economic conditions in each region and destination, and b) the preparedness of each property for the post-crisis period.

This downtime of low hotel occupancies or property closures is the perfect time for post-crisis planning, digital marketing action plan development, product and marketing campaign ideations. The question to the digital marketing community is, which specific action-items SHOULD be included in a hotelier's Post-Crisis Top Three Digital Marketing Action Plan? In addition, please suggest one creative, OUTSIDE-THE BOX idea... something we have not seen yet in hotel digital marketing. Just an idea... big or small.

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Simone Puorto
Simone Puorto
Founder | CEO | Futurist

Problem with COVID-19 is that we're forced to make previsions with limited, fragmented (if not contradictory) sets of data. In '01 I was working in MICE, probably the industry that paid the highest toll, and I've survived my share of disasters (including a mysterious crop circle case in '99 in a Roman hotel...). COVID-19, however, is a different story.  Some examples? Five months after the 1st case, scientists are still speculating on the origin of the virus. Bats? Pangolins? Enemies of Greta Thunberg? No one knows.

Want more? EU can't agree on a shared crisis management plan, and each Country is calculating the fatality rate with arbitrary metrics, so that (real) mortality can be anywhere from 0.0001% to 99%, making any rational argumentation impossible. 

As we say in tech: garbage in, garbage out so, if you're confident enough to predict the future based on this garbage data only, you're either lying or have insights that us mere mortals don't.

What history taught me, however, is that travel IS resilient. Humans are a migratory species, and our desire to travel is archetypical. If I look back at my 20+Y in the industry, I would agree with Max (99 out of 100 he's right anyway), but I honestly don't have that confidence today.

My suggestion, then, is to stick with the scarce official data available, avoid this plethora of how-to-survive-COVID-19-in-ten-simple-step webinars (they're useful like a spork), and save your strength for where you're gonna need it again. 

Hopefully, sooner than you expect.

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