Employee Burnout During COVID-19 in the Hotel Industry

Abstract

Employee emotions and feelings are often overlooked in the hotel industry, this could not be more true since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. This is mainly due to the hotels having to make drastic cutbacks in order to survive owing to the massive decline of guests due to the closing of the international borders. Therefore, this has had a huge impact on employees working from within the hotel industry. The purpose of this study is to examine the burnout of hotel employees. A quantitative approach was taken by distributing questionnaires to hotel employees working in the heavily tourist-dependent island of Phuket, Thailand. As a result, 420 valid responses were collected which were then uploaded and analysed by using SPSS. The results showed that burnout has increased drastically among hotel employees during the COVID-19 crisis. The results also indicate different demographic and job characteristics that have been found to have significantly high burnout values. The hotel industry needs to focus on employee welfare to avoid employees burning out, human resource strategies and initiatives should be implemented.