Toward a sustained recovery of the lodging sector: a management path to lessen the Corona Variants upshots
Authors: Emara Ola Abdel Moneim , Halim Hazem Tawfik , El-Deeb Mohamed Samy , Halim Yasser Tawfik 
Published: January 2023

The lodging industry is an important source of national income being a main ingredient for tourism, also, as it contributes to solving the problem of unemployment. Predominantly, the lodging sector supports the balance of payments. At this place, a reading to “Alpha”; “Beta”; “Gamma”; “Delta”; and “Omicron”—Corona Variants reflects significant implications. On the one hand, there exists a challenge to Egypt’s hotel industry following the pandemic attack; on the other hand, and by considering the case of relaxing the international restrictions, the international tourism is expected to recoup. Egypt has relatively benefited in the first half of 2021 when many Europeans escaped the lower temperature in winter in their homelands opting warm holiday destinations. The primary readings also expect the continuity in this increase. The macro-trend right here considers the shift in favor of a thoroughly managed risk with enhanced pliability, adopting a view of creating value, and increasing trust, while the micro-management considerations signify enhancing the sustainability of the sector performance by means of raising lodging hygienic attributes and approving innovative approaches. Luxury hotel, led by their executives, can significantly contribute and steer this trend mainly for cost tolerance estimates and for the potentiality of cost recovery. This study addresses the ways with which “Alpha”; “Beta”; “Gamma”; “Delta”; and “Omicron” Corona variants necessitate more sustained hotel management practices and helps to establish knowledge and techniques that assist the lodging sector in Egypt. A further goal of this study is to endorse the hotel managers’ impact on counteracting the upshots of Variants’ progressions. The study is multifaceted in “scale” and “scope,” since it is based on an investigation of the effects of large-scale public health emergencies in the lodging sector. A qualitative methodology is set via conducting online and offline surveys to examine how the pandemic affect lodging sector operations, and how far Egypt’s luxury hotel managers tolerate both burdens of managing the emergency and creating sustained plans for recovery. Henceforward, the study constructs a frame for sustained lodging sector recovery. The paper’s scientific value is that it functionalizes a broad inductive method of qualitative research in which a merge of the interpretation of management enabling factors and health enabling trends in the lodging sector and luxury hotel managers’ responses obtained through exploratory qualitative research is utilized to cluster the managers’ responses and thus generalize the information in the setting of a Framework for Health Crisis Management in the lodging sector. The Framework for Health Crisis Management also adds value as it amalgamates a combination of input factors of management and health enablers; a transformation via the change actions; an output of containing the effect of the pandemic through the enhanced managers’ capabilities and hotels’ health hygiene readiness; and an outcome implication of medium-term stabilizing effects that leads to an impact effect of sustained lodging sector recovery. This configures an input, transform (actions), output, outcome, and impact result chain. The study reaches the findings that sustainable recovery in the lodging sector—being sensitive to the uncertainty that the Virus “Variants” create—necessitates the merge between managing the emergency, adopting pliable approaches, alongside with the enhancement of the managers’ (hoteliers) role as a supporting premise.