Social Sustainability in COVID-19 Crisis : The Case of the Hotel Industry

The COVID-19 outbreak, travel restrictions, or other safety norms had a huge negative impact on the world hotel industry from the beginning of 2020. In response to the crisis majority of the hotels all around the world had decided to get closed temporarily. Such a deep crisis arose many social problems especially among the employees of the industry. However, there were still cases, when hotels decided to choose different strategies rather than closing their doors for their customers. One of us had a great opportunity to spend 14 days of quarantine in one of such hotels and to collect the valuable information from inside the hotel room, which had been converted into a quarantine zone after the virus outbreak. Besides, we also explored several more cases from 4 different countries about the hotels that have chosen to create social benefits in different ways. In this thesis, we have analyzed socially sustainable strategic solutions from the hotel industry, explored characteristics, and described the circumstances that encouraged such solutions