The Impact of COVID-19 on the European Hotel Sector

Russell Kett | September 24, 2020

By Russell Kett There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a most dramatic effect on the hotel business throughout Europe and words like ‘unprecedented’ and ‘unique’ are used liberally to describe the situation. Performance data from STR for the first half of the year compared with 2019 show how dramatic the effect on the hotel sector has been with RevPAR since March 2020 nose-diving, with many hotels closing their doors. Figure 1 shows the performance of those hotels which remained open during this period. (Adding in those hotels achieving zero RevPAR would make the graph look worse still.) Figure 1: European Hotels R...