By Logan Stein

COVID-19’s effect on hotels

Mar 27, 2020 | 5:08 PM

Hotels throughout Canada are feeling the effects that COVID-19 has had on their business.

d3h Hotels, which owns the Days Inn and Home hotel in Medicine Hat, have had to make some very difficult decisions for their company.

“It’s been a incredibly tough couple of weeks for our entire company.”

“Its been a incredibly tough couple of weeks for our entire company. The number of lay-offs especially at the hotel level, we’re probably somewhere in the 40-50% of staff we have had to serve a lay-off notice to,” said the Chief business development officer for d3h Hotels, Paul Rosten.

The company has followed the recommendations from hotel associations throughout North America, to close down certain services offered at the hotels.

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“What we tried to do is look at all the recommendations from the hotel associations, and we saw some publications coming from the states as far as proper procedure. We as a company decided to air on the side of caution. In the hotels themselves we closed off anything that was a public area such as the business centers, or the pools.”

“There has been a lot of hard decisions that have we had to make. It has been really difficult to forecast the future, there is so much uncertainty,” added Rosten.

Rosten added that the main priority of businesses right now should be to help flatten the curve of COVID-19.

“Theres that initial moment of panic. And then there is the hard decision making, now we have to come up with our plans for tomorrow, next week, next month and 3 to 6 months down the road and it has just been really difficult to forecast this, just with the amount of