The COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to have an impact right across the hospitality industry.  The worldwide impact acrooss the hosptality sectorwas accutly fealt with a significant drop off in revenues. Even when lockdowns were lifted, businesses struggled to obtain bookings at pre pandemic levels, requiring some creative pivoting in business modelling to mitigate further losses going forward.  Global travel was also impacted and even when it did resume many people people were reluctant to travel for fear of contracting the virus.

Losses from the period in many countries when hotels, pubs and restaurants were forced to close, a very slow uptake in booking once they reopened when booking dropped away have meant that across the industry businesses are looking at ways to mitigate the damage caused as well as how to move forward.  Travel was restricted in many countries across the globe and even when travel was permitted many fewer people are willing to travel compared to the period before the outbreak of COVID-19.

Many of the larger groups used the pandemic to review and refine every aspect of their business to improve viabilty with new technology playing an integral part in this process.

In a bid to improve occupancy rates, hotel chains are utilising Artificial Intelligence on the vast amount of  customer data they ahave accumilated anlong with reactive pricing in accordance with increases and decreases. in demain accociated with holiday periods and local events.

This approach ensures they can quickly adjust pricing to improve occupancy rates and hence the bottom line.  Most hotels also work with a myriad of search sites such as Hotels.com, Booking.com, Whatif, HotelsCombined, Trivago etc. and again having fast and proactive pricing for these sites is vital.

Targeted e-mail campaigns using algorithms based on historical customer activities and trends is also having an increasing impact in this sector.