Covid-19: A wake-up call for the hotel industry themalaysianreserve.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from themalaysianreserve.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The industry is already running on massive losses due to low occupancy rates throughout 2020 until now.
Compounding matters is that there is little visibility in sight of when movement and travel bans will be lifted due to the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic resulting from new highly transmissible and airborne variants.
Like many businesses that face challenging times, mergers and acquisitions deals involving hotels are popping up as owners opt to sell out rather than incur more losses. Meanwhile opportunistic buyers with fat wallets are scouring the scene.
Listings of hotels for sale in Malaysia have jumped 40% year-to-date due to rising interest from both local and overseas investors, says Previndran Singhe of Zerin Properties, adding that prices for hotel properties have dropped by as much as 35% as compared to pre-lockdown times.
Economic stimulus packages failed tourism industry: LGE thesundaily.my - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thesundaily.my Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Hotels in Malaysia lose an estimated RM300mil for every two weeks of closure during the pandemic. MARTEN BJORK/Unsplash
The hospitality sector in Malaysia will likely crumble before Covid-19 cases are kept under control and hotels are allowed to operate again.
Further delays to the reopening of hotels will threaten the industry’s survivability and impact livelihoods of industry employees, said OYO vice-president and country head (Malaysia & Singapore) Tan Ming Luk.
“The hospitality industry, which loses an estimated RM300mil for every two weeks of (closure during) the pandemic and ongoing travel restrictions, cannot wait for the whole country to get case numbers under control, looking at the difficulty in managing hotspots, or even for 60% of the population to be inoculated,” he said in a statement.
Welcome boost: With the suggestion to relax curbs for two-dose vaccine recipients, it is hoped that people will be able to travel and eat at a food court as shown in this file picture taken before the pandemic.
GEORGE TOWN: The proposal to ease movement restrictions for those who have been fully vaccinated is a much-needed boost to those involved in the tourism industry.
Malaysian Association of Hotels (MAH) Penang Chapter chairman K. Raj Kumar said the suggestion, if materialised, would help inject some life into the fragile industry which had been badly hit by the pandemic since last year.