New Restrictions Mean More Pain For Halifax Hotels
HALIFAX — Halifax’s hotel industry continues to feel the pinch as a Covid-19 outbreak in Nova Scotia fuels new restrictions and border closures.
The provincial government announced a new round of restrictions Thursday as active Covid cases in the province surged to 111.
Those rules come on the heels of a near-total shutdown of traffic at provincial borders earlier this week and a postponed opening date for the Atlantic Bubble.
Megan Delaney is the general manager at Cambridge Suites Hotel Halifax and the president of the Hotel Association of Nova Scotia. She says public health restrictions are eating into the few sources of customers the city’s hotels are still serving.
She says most hotels have been getting by with a combination of government subsidies and cobbling together business from small sections of the population that still need to rent a room.
Those include people traveling for pleasure within the province, some rotational workers, occasional visitors from out of province who need to self-isolate.
“There are lots of small pieces that equate to whatever the hotel business or that hotel is doing,” Delaney told Huddle in an interview Wednesday. “I would say [new restrictions take away] just another small piece—but the more we lose the small pieces, the more the impact grows.”
At the height of the pandemic, many hotels saw their occupancy drop by 90 percent or more. More than a year later, Delaney says most Halifax hotels haven’t bounced back very far.
“It’s not great,” she said of hotel occupancy. “For most operators, it’s probably a little bit more healthy than it was in December, just due to things like it being nice outside. But our revenues are still really plummeting.”
Delaney pointed out that, even for those who are seeing a slightly higher occupancy rate, demand is still way down. That means most hotel operators are selling rooms at deep discounts.
“So, the industry overall has a lot of ground to make up. It’s going to take multiple years to recover,” she said.
Financial support from governments is helping, however,
As part of its recent budget, the federal government extended wage and rent subsidies for businesses until September. The Nova Scotia government has also offered two rounds of property tax relief for accommodations operators.
Together, Delaney says these supports are keeping hotels afloat.
She stressed that HANS also supports public health restrictions that keep Nova Scotians safe and is thankful the provincial government is keeping lines of communication open and doing as much as possible to let hotel operators know when and how new restrictions will come into effect.
Although it’s impossible to predict how the pandemic will evolve, and new rules can still come about suddenly, Delaney says hotel operators can be prepared much better if communication is strong.
However, that still doesn’t mean business planning during a pandemic is in any way easy.
Delaney says balancing keeping staff and guests safe with trying to plan for the coming summer is a difficult task—especially when things can change so quickly.
“It’s almost like you’re running two business plans at the same time, not knowing when either one is going to end, and the other one will begin,” she says.
“It’s a lot of up and down. And, you know, a strategy a lot of the hoteliers and the association talked about is just about focusing on what you have control over and the plan you have in place,” she adds.
Delaney also stresses that, while border closures and restrictions have been tough on businesses, the overall health of the community is what’s really important during the pandemic.
“The road has been tough for tourism, but we’re not healthcare. We’re not people who [for the most part] have been directly impacted by the death of a family member from COVID-19. Those are the real people that are having a hard time and struggling throughout this year. So we can talk about economic struggles, but it’s all about perspective,” she says
“The tourism industry is part of a much larger community. And we want that community to have good health. And then when people feel safe to travel, we hope they really come out and to support local.”