Sustainability and Competitiveness in the Hospitality Industry (Advances in Hospitality, Tourism, and the Services Industry)

The tourism industry comprises business activities that are among the areas experiencing the most expansion and development in recent years. Increased tourism demand has generated exponential growth in tourism offers, and this industry's dynamic trends have boosted regional development and enhanced tourism companies' competitiveness. The tourism industry has become one of the main economic sectors worldwide, with the third largest export volume and, in 2019, 7% of global trade. In some countries, tourism accounts for more than 20% of the gross domestic product. In view of the tourism and hospitality industry's evolution and consolidation, the prospects for 2020 were considered quite positive and promising. Due to the pandemic, the hotel industry now faces unprecedented challenges. The main COVID-19 preventive measures are social distancing, mobility restrictions, and border closures. These efforts to flatten the COVID-19 curve have wiped out entire hotel companies and drastically reduced tourism demand. The crisis's impacts have been felt in all industries worldwide, but the travel and tourism industries are among those most affected. Before 2020, studies had already reported that, like tourism, the hotel industry had experienced an extremely large number of changes and interruptions over the previous few years, which meant that hotels faced a set of challenges and opportunities. New technologies and social networks have facilitated the creation of virtual communities that have had a profound effect on consumers, as well as creating more transparency and better quality of services. With the pandemic, these issues abruptly became the challenges of the past.The hotel industry must now respond to the crisis – after much careful reflection and substantial changes in its operations and business models – to guarantee these strategies' sustainability in the post-pandemic period. More research on the scope of new business models, operating models, value and distribution chains and human resources allocation, among other components, is fundamental to formulating knowledge in new ways. Further studies on these topics are needed to foster appropriate responses in the hotel industry. Within this context, this book focuses on complex issues from a hotel industry perspective and emerges as a survey of existing research, reflecting on the pandemic's impacts and generating scenarios for how to strengthen business structures. This book contains investigations that sought, based on analyses of the pandemic's impacts and changes in demand, to support hospitality companies' planning and management and rethink business models and human resources and competitiveness strategies. The researchers' goal was to strengthen this extremely important industry's sustainability and resilience to help boost economies.