New technologies used in COVID-19 for business survival: Insights from the Hotel Sector in China
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New technologies used in COVID‑19 for business survival: Insights from the Hotel Sector in China Arthur Lau1 Received: 29 September 2020 / Revised: 18 October 2020 / Accepted: 5 November 2020 / Published online: 23 November 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The tourism industry is in a fight for survival during the coronavirus pandemic. This essay was written based upon several interviews conducted with directors and general managers of nine well-known hotels in China with the aim to investigate what new technologies are used to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. DeLone and McLean’s Information System Success Model was applied to examine the adopted digital technologies. Live-stream promotion and live-stream conference are introduced to primarily improve information quality, while 5G technology and Wi-Fi 6 are installed to enhance the system quality. Facial recognition, AI, and Robots are integrated to the daily operations to enhance service quality. Challenges and future directions are discussed. Keywords COVID-19 · New technologies · Hotel · Information System
1 Introduction The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has exerted a tremendous impact on the tourism industry worldwide. Travel restrictions, quarantines, and closures of transportations has led to a 22% decline of international tourist arrivals in Q1 2020 compared with 2019 and possibly to 60–80% over the entire year (UNWTO 2020). At present, the global travel and tourism industry is in a fight for survival with an estimated 50 million global jobs at risk due to the pandemic. UNWTO Secretary General Zurab Pololikashvili stated that, “The world is facing an unprecedented health and economic crisis. Tourism has been hit hard, with millions of jobs at risk in one of the most labor-intensive sectors of the economy” (UNWTO 2020, p. 1). As of September 2020, in the United States alone, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 4.8 million hospitality and leisure jobs have been lost since February 2020 (AHLA 2020). * Arthur Lau [email protected] 1
The Westin Pazhou Hotel, Guangzhou, China
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The coronavirus is highly infectious. Natural human exhalation flows such as sneezing, coughing, breathing, and speaking can release the virus that causes infections (Tang et al. 2013). Moreover, a research unit has announced the possibility of the virus mixing with aerosol suspended in the air and being inhaled by humans (Van Doremalen et al. 2020). Clustered infections have been reported in bars (Wong 2020), hotels (Peltier and Minder 2020), hot pot cafes (Su 2020), wedding banquets (Gross 2020), and karaoke parlors (Inada 2020). As the coronavirus pandemic started, hotel occupancy in China was immediately dropped to nearly zero. Hotel chains were forced to try and examine new approaches/technologies to make money and maintain the cash flow. To investigate the new technologies used in COVID-19, interviews were conducted with Directors and General Managers of eight well-known hotels between
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