Restaurants and COVID-19: A Focus on Sustainability and Recovery Pathways
The hospitality industry, specifically the restaurant sector, is one of the leading global sources of employment, and it generates considerable revenue. However, the industry is susceptible to disasters that destroy infrastructure and affect human movemen
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Restaurants and COVID-19: A Focus on Sustainability and Recovery Pathways
Abstract The hospitality industry, specifically the restaurant sector, is one of the leading global sources of employment, and it generates considerable revenue. However, the industry is susceptible to disasters that destroy infrastructure and affect human movement, notably the outbreak of pandemics and epidemics. This study investigated the early impacts of COVID-19 on the global hospitality’s restaurant sector. The study made of data from the OpenTable database and the National Restaurant Association of America. It emerged from the study that most restaurants were shut down for sit-in meals as governments increasingly promulgated regulations for social distancing and lockdowns. This adversely affected fine dining and family restaurants, pubs and taverns. The fast-food outlets were equally affected with businesses mostly operating at less than 20% capacity. This led to substantial financial losses and direct and indirect jobs losses thus bringing many restaurants into unprecedented liquidity challenges. At the peak of the pandemic impact in the USA, millions of restaurant employees lost their jobs. The study recommends a raft of tailor-made measures to assist the restaurant businesses and employees during and after the crisis so that both emerge out of it stronger and resilient to withstand such possible future events. Among such measures are tax rebates for employees and business; improved health and hygiene measures; the provision of grants, loans and debt relief interventions; decreased interests on loans; and other innovative measures to ensure business viability post the pandemic. Keywords SDG 8 · SDG 12 · COVID-19 · Jobs · Restaurants · Hospitality · Tourism · USA
9.1 Introduction Kim et al. (2005) and Tse et al. (2006) argue that restaurants, as well as hotels, airlines, travel agencies and resorts, are usually at the receiving end of catastrophes both natural and man-made. The tourism and hospitality sector is vulnerable to human calamities and extreme weather events calamities such as hurricanes, tropical cyclones, tornados, tsunamis, financial crisis and wars. The past decade was been characterised by weather extreme events at the instigation climate variability. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 G. Nhamo et al., Counting the Cost of COVID-19 on the Global Tourism Industry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56231-1_9
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9 Restaurants and COVID-19: A Focus on Sustainability and Recovery Pathways
The year 2019 while it started with news headlines of the fires in South West Australia, these were nothing compared to the global impact of coronavirus that crippled many sectors of the tourism economy (Dube et al. 2020; Gössling et al. 2020). COVID-19 pandemic presented a challenge to the world’s quest to attain the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (AfSD), with its interlocked 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). While the pandemic
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