Ensuring a sustainable hospitality and tourism industry in the COVID-19 era: using an open market valuation technique

Tourism has always been one of the most profitable service industries. But because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tourism industry is facing some big problems. As a result, the tourism industry lost a lot of money. This paper aims to find and rank recovery solutions to help the tourism industry. This article investigates two key areas: firstly, how government aid can best be prioritised among the various subsectors of the hospitality and tourism industry, and secondly, whether public assessment of the measures the US government took against the pandemic is related to the outlook for recovery, including the role played by perceptions of government performance and efficacy at handling the crisis and self-efficacy in terms of avoiding infection. Two studies were conducted among US consumers, using different methods of data collection and analysis. The first study utilised an open market valuation technique to explore how governmental aid might be prioritised among the tourism and hospitality industries. The second study used AMOS/SEM to examine travellers’ positive perceptions of the likelihood of hospitality and tourism industry recovery. Study 1 found that all six industry subsectors investigated (hotels, airlines, restaurants, car rentals, casinos and cruise lines) had been influenced negatively by COVID-19, with the heaviest impact felt by hotels and cruise lines. Study 2 indicated that the level of public satisfaction with the US government’s performance in addressing the pandemic was positively related to expectations of hospitality and tourism industry recovery. The findings could guide policymakers in deciding how best to allocate public funds between the different subsectors of the hospitality and tourism industry.