Business Hotels’ Recovery from Pandemic

Tourism is back on the rise for the first time in three years, thanks to lifting travel restrictions and guidelines in most countries. Travelers trust hotels and airlines to have their best health in mind, so they are confident to experience new destinations after so long trapped in their homes. But at the moment, business hotels are a different story. This may change; as everyone has learned in the past three years, no business protocols are set in stone. The future may hold dozens of new uncertainties and variables that shift the industry drastically. But for now, business hotels are the aspect of lodging that are suffering the most from post-pandemic practices.

What is a business hotel?

A business hotel is a hotel that is set up specifically for business travel. Usually, a business hotel is located near a large convention center or another attraction for general business trips. It will have many amenities that cater to this particular group of people: meeting rooms, rentable studies, office supplies and additional desk space in rooms, and even computers available for those who did not bring their own laptop. They will have printing, faxing, and scanning abilities as well. With these amenities, they work to provide the best place for individuals in business to work peacefully while away from their normal everyday routine.

In our current post-pandemic world, business trips have all but been eliminated. Many visits to conventions or continuing education classes have been largely changed to virtual gatherings. What used to be commonplace – staying in a hotel for a week or so that was paid for by the business and working on a project with others from across the country – is now seen as an unnecessary expense and unhelpful risk to healthy workers. Most workers in digital-based businesses are remote, anyway. Those who have conventions and would be utilizing business hotels are no longer even coming into the office. They are far less likely to take a work trip when their work doesn’t even require them to show up physically, and employers are less likely to facilitate the kind of trip that would require a business hotel.

Despite this, business hotels will likely recover just as other instances of lodging businesses have done. While hotels centering around vacations have bounced back more quickly thanks to individual citizens’ responses, business hotels are waiting for companies themselves to lower their guard and accept that we can return to life the way it was before. Not only that, but these companies will have to decide that it is fruitful and beneficial to do so. As a myriad of information unfolds detailing the importance of collaborating in person and continuing to be around one another, as well as continued lower guidelines and lifted penalties for breaking federal protocols, companies will be more likely to utilize business hotels. It may not happen all at once, but it is a likely future.