Exploring COVID-19 Recovery Mechanisms of the Accommodation Sector in South Africa

Peter Chihwai () and Kaitano Dube
Additional contact information
Peter Chihwai: Vaal University of Technology
Kaitano Dube: Vaal University of Technology

Chapter Chapter 16 in COVID-19, Tourist Destinations and Prospects for Recovery, 2023, pp 271-291 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has been disastrous to all sectors of the economy, and the accommodation industry has been the most affected. This chapter explores accommodation occupancy during the COVID-19 era, interrogates the recovery strategies adopted, and suggests other recovery mechanisms and strategies for quicker and complete recovery of the tourism accommodation industry. The study follows a qualitative research design approach. Annual Integrated reports from Sun International hotels and City Lodge and Hotels group were analysed. The study found that South Africa’s accommodation industry adopted various recovery mechanisms, such as encouraging employees and tourists to go for the COVID-19 vaccine, which stimulated mobility and sociability, sanitisation at accommodation sites, social distancing, and wearing of masks and probing the government to open the industry fully to COVID-19 alert level 1. The South African accommodation industry did not implement other robust marketing strategies that bolster domestic tourism, nor did it implement the Safari service quality model (SAFSERV) and management strategies. It is recommended that South Africa’s accommodation industry recovery path should adopt robust strategies to expedite full recovery from COVID-19, such as adopting the SAFSERV model and different marketing strategies. A fusion of health-related mechanisms, COVID-19 cure, and marketing management strategies is recommended to expedite full recovery by the tourism accommodation industry.

Keywords: Hotels; Marketing; Recovery strategies; SAFSERV; Service quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-28340-6_16

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031283406

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-28340-6_16

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().