A hotel industry group has warned that 44% of hotel employees in every state are projected to have lost or will lose their jobs in the coming weeks, resulting in 4.4 million job losses due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The impact to our industry is already more severe than anything we’ve seen before,” said Chip Rogers, president and CEO of the American Hotel & Lodging Association.
Rogers’s association said in a statement that the industry is “facing an abrupt and unprecedented drop in hotel demand that is gaining pace and getting progressively deeper and more severe week by week.”
According to the latest industry data, large states such as California, Florida, New York, and Texas will have the biggest losses, with each state losing hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The hotel industry supports over 8.3 million jobs in total, but that number will soon be cut in half due to drastic declines in hotel occupancy rates due to the coronavirus travel restrictions. According to the hotel association, hotel owners are already reporting facing massive, unavoidable layoffs, leading to enormous job losses across the industry.
Rogers, along with other hotel executives, met with President Trump at the White House on Tuesday to explain how the federal government could help them.
Rogers said in a statement on Friday that the White House and Congress need to “take urgent action to protect countless jobs, provide relief to our dedicated and hardworking employees, and ensure that our small business operators and franchise owners, who represent more than half of hotels in the country, can keep their doors open.”
