Covid Versus Hospitality 

Covid-19 hit the world couple years ago, and since then it has affected everybody’s’ life and health. Covid shut down the whole world, and in the same time covid shut down the whole business world. It made all the restaurants to shut down, and people needed to stay at home behind closed doors. This means that a lot of businesses were not getting any money because there were no customers, which lead to many businesses going bankrupt when they didn’t have money to keep everything closed while the expenses of the properties for example still keep going.  

One section of business that covid had a really bad affect was the hospitality sector of business. When the covid came, a high percentage of the businesses in the hospitality sector took a really big hit as well. The restaurants were obligated to close their doors, so the pandemic would not spread more. This was horrible news for a lot of businesses since the expenses keep running on the restaurants even if they can’t let any customers in. The pandemic had a big impact on other businesses in the hospitality sector as well like in the travel industry. It closed all the borders and travelling was denied basically everywhere in the world which resulted in airlines going bankrupt, making a lot off loss. The affects that the pandemic did for the hospitality industry, will take years to recover from and to get back to the earlier condition. The pandemic was said to possibly affect over 50 million jobs in the industry worldwide.  This can also be seen when it is noticed that the hospitality industry saw the biggest declines during the pandemic when comparing to the other industries. (Dogra) 

Immediately from the first months of covid, it put out a relentless financial strain on the organizations in the hospitality industry. During the first few months covid took out more than 8 million jobs in the industry. This was the biggest hit to any industry during the pandemic, when talking about the working force of the industry. The businesses were made to let people go when the pandemic because everyone just had to find a way to save money, so they could get trough the pandemic without going bankrupt, but even with all the effort it wasn’t enough for all of the businesses and they went bankrupt in the end. The world has already started recovering from the pandemic when for example the US jobs market has passed up the pre-pandemic levels that it had, but the hospitality industry is still coming far behind when they have over million jobs still looking for workers. It could be possible that a lot of the workers in the industry who got laid off during the pandemic had to change industries to find work from somewhere else and they are not coming back to the hospitality industry anymore. This can be an really problematic effect on the industry since they are in a high need of employees at the moment and are constantly looking for new ones. (Luhn 2022) 

Even tough covid had a rough affect on the majority of businesses, it had a really good affect on a small part of them. One good example would be a Finnish delivery company Wolt. They are a company that delivers foods from restaurants to their customers at home. Wolt had a massive spike in their business during the covid, when the customers couldn’t leave their home but they were able to order food from some restaurants straight to their door. This was a win win situation when the restaurants were able to keep running their business and the customers were able to get their stomach full with good food. Some would say that Wolt was just on the right place in the right time, since they established the company prior to covid and then the pandemic hit and Wolt basically had the perfect solution for the restaurants and the customers when people were not allowed and also didn’t want to move out of their houses.  

Sources :  

Dogra, S. Covid-19 : Impact on the Hospitality Workforce. Read on 17.11.2023  

https://hospitalityinsights.ehl.edu/covid-19-impact-hospitality-workforce  

Luhn, B. 2022. Anger Over Covid-19 Layoffs Keeping Hospitality Workers from Returning to Jobs. Read on 17.11.2023. https://uh.edu/news-events/stories/2022-news-articles/december-2022/12212022-hospitality-anger-study.php