How a typical employer in hotels, lodging, travel, tourism and event venues operates
A hotel, resort, inn, short-term rental business, casino hotel, convention center, tour operator or event venue sells occupancy, food and beverage, meetings and events, amenities and access to a destination, to a guest who must travel to buy them and who is served on the premises by a workforce that must travel to work. Every one of those functions is a function an order can reach, and every one of them was reached: by lodging closures and leisure-guest bans, by traveler quarantines, by gathering caps and event prohibitions, by amenity closures, by casino shutdowns, by conveyance and border orders, and by the stay-at-home orders that confined both the guest and the housekeeper. This section describes the industry in the operational terms the orders used, so that the layers, the quarters and the functions below can be read against it.
The functions of this industry are coded as follows, and each is stated in terms an order can reach.
LG, lodging and occupancy
The sale of a room or unit for a night, taken through a reservation system (online, telephone, third-party platform or group block), confirmed at a front desk, and delivered by a housekeeping department that turns the room between guests. An order reaches it by closing lodging to a class of guest, capping rooms, suspending online reservations, forbidding new check-ins, requiring a traveler form at the desk or designating the room as a quarantine location.
FB, food and beverage outlets
The restaurant, bar, lounge, room service, banquet kitchen, coffee shop and pool bar. An order reaches it by closing dine-in service, restricting alcohol, capping seats, spacing tables, closing bars that do not serve food, imposing closing hours or requiring proof of vaccination at the door.
MC, meetings, conventions and banquets
The ballroom, breakout rooms, exhibit halls and the convention centers that anchor a market's group business. An order reaches it by prohibiting gatherings above a number, closing venues, capping rooms at a percentage, requiring approved event plans or closing the convention center itself.
AM, amenities
Pools, hot tubs, spas, fitness centers, casinos and gaming floors, valet, buffets, shuttles, tours and the entertainment showroom. An order reaches it by closing the pool and gym, shutting the gaming floor, disabling every other slot machine, forbidding buffets and valet and closing the showroom.
TV, travel demand
The arriving guest, delivered by air, cruise, road or rail from another State or another country. An order reaches it by quarantining the arrival, testing the arrival, suspending entry, confining the border to essential travel, halting cruise embarkation and placing every passenger under airborne-transmission controls.
GS, group sales
The contracts for room blocks, meetings, weddings and tours booked months ahead. An order reaches it by cancelling the event, capping the room or barring the destination, and the cancellation reaches the block.
HK, housekeeping and operating protocols
Cleaning frequency, occupancy of turned rooms, employee screening, distancing, masking and health-and-safety plans. An order reaches it by prescribing them.
SC, supply chain
Linens, food, beverage, amenities and the contractors who service the building. An order reaches it by closing the supplier, the border or the port.
HR, hiring, credentialing, seasonal and foreign labor
The J-1 and H-2B seasonal workforce, the gaming licenses, the food-handler and alcohol permits and the pre-employment screening. An order reaches it by suspending visa services and consular appointments, closing the licensing office and mandating testing or vaccination.
OP, office and telework
Sales, revenue management, accounting and reservations. An order reaches it by mandating telework and closing offices.
WF, workforce availability
The housekeeper, cook, server, dealer, driver and front-desk agent, who commute by transit, whose children were in closed schools, and who were quarantined on exposure. An order reaches it by stay-at-home orders, the airborne-transmission controls on transit, school closures and quarantine directives.
CB, the customer base
The leisure traveler, the business traveler, the convention delegate, the wedding party and the tour group. An order reaches it by confining, quarantining, testing or excluding the guest.
The revenue lines
Rooms revenue is the largest line for traveler accommodation and the one the closures and quarantines reached first; food and beverage is the second, and it was closed to dine-in service in every State in the spring of 2020; group and catering revenue depends on the ballroom and the convention center, both of which were closed or capped for more than a year in most markets; gaming revenue in the casino hotels of Nevada, New Jersey, Mississippi, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, Colorado and the tribal jurisdictions was zero while the regulators' shutdown orders ran; and ancillary revenue (parking, spa, resort fees, tours and attractions) followed the amenities the orders closed.1 The Bureau of Economic Analysis records the result for 2020: real tourism output fell 47.4 percent, traveler accommodations output 32.4 percent and air passenger transportation output 53.9 percent, and direct tourism employment fell 42.5 percent to 3,677,000.2
The industry's counterparties are the guest, delivered by airlines, cruise lines, Amtrak, motor coaches and the highway; the meeting planner, the association, the corporate travel department and the tour operator who deliver the group; the online travel agencies and short-term-rental platforms through which reservations are made; the convention center and the arena whose calendar fills the market's rooms; the food, beverage, linen and amenity suppliers; the landlord, the lender and the franchisor; the airport, the port and the transit authority; the gaming, alcohol, health and lodging regulators whose licenses condition every revenue function; the consular posts and the Department of Labor through which seasonal labor arrives; and the schools that keep the workforce's children during the shift. Each of those counterparties was itself under orders, and the layers section below catalogues them layer by layer.
The workforce
Accommodation employed 2,107,800 people in February 2020; in May 2020 it employed 1,056,600; the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that leisure and hospitality lost 7.7 million jobs, 47 percent, in April 2020 alone.3 The workforce is hourly, on-site and shift-based: housekeepers, cooks, servers, bartenders, front-desk agents, bell staff, dealers, slot attendants, banquet servers, drivers and guides. It cannot perform its work remotely; it commutes by bus, rail and car; in resort markets it is seasonal and in part foreign, arriving on J-1 and H-2B visas through consular posts that suspended routine visa services on March 20, 2020; and it is subject to the quarantine, isolation, screening, distancing and face-covering requirements, the workplace infection-prevention and exposure-control regime that governed every workplace.4 The Notice's telework analysis, which asks whether "the employer's physical work space is so critical to its trade or business operations that tasks central to the trade or business's operations are unable to be performed remotely," answers itself for a hotel: the room, the kitchen, the ballroom and the casino floor cannot be operated from home.5
Seasonality and geography
The industry is concentrated where its guests go: the resort States and counties (Hawaii, Nevada, Florida, the Colorado and Utah ski counties, the Northeast's coast and mountains, the Gulf Coast casinos), the convention cities (Las Vegas, Chicago, Orlando, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Denver, San Diego, Anaheim) and the gateway markets whose guests arrive from Canada, Mexico, Europe and Asia (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Seattle, the northern border States). Its seasons are the summer leisure season, the winter ski and sun seasons, the spring and fall convention seasons and the holiday periods, and the orders of 2020 and 2021 fell on each: the spring 2020 closures on the Easter, spring-break and Coachella season; the summer 2020 quarantines on the Northeast's beach and mountain season; the winter 2020-21 re-tightening on the ski, holiday and Sun Belt season; the Delta-wave reinstatements of July through September 2021 on the summer and Labor Day season and the fall convention calendar.6
The counterparty map
For each counterparty class, the orders that reached it were these. The guest: stay-at-home orders in forty-two States and territories in the spring of 2020; traveler quarantines in at least twenty-four States and the District of Columbia in 2020, in Hawaii through September 30, 2021 and beyond, and in Kansas and Rhode Island into the third quarter of 2021; the entry proclamations and land-border limits from January and March 2020 to November 8, 2021; the inbound testing order from January 26, 2021; the conveyance order's airborne-transmission controls from February 1, 2021 (the federal layer and the fifty States, below). The group: gathering caps and event prohibitions in every State from March 2020, in most through the spring of 2021, in Hawaii through December 1, 2021; convention-center closures from March 2020 into 2021 (the fifty States and the sector regulators, below). The carrier: the No Sail Order, the Conditional Sailing Order and the Captain of the Port requirements the Coast Guard bulletins announced; the DOT minimum-service orders and slot waivers; the Amtrak and transit reductions; the FRA and TSA directives implementing the conveyance order's controls (the federal layer and the sector regulators, below). The platform: the short-term-rental bans of Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Delaware, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, South Carolina and the resort counties, and the platform reporting orders of Chicago (the fifty States and the metros, below). The regulator: the gaming boards' shutdown and reopening orders; the alcohol regulators' bar closures; the lodging and health departments' sector rules (the sector regulators, below). The workforce: school closures, the transit exposure controls, quarantine and isolation directives, and the visa suspensions (the ecosystem, below). The interconnected-economy section draws these together.