Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/11/covid-results-in-1-billion-unsold-hotel-room-nights-in-2020.html
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First, and most importantly:
It didn’t have to be like this.
If you want my sympathy you can start by acknowledging this, and acknowledging why, which they won’t, because for pretty much every hotel owner in America it would have to begin with: “This happened because I voted for Donald Trump”.
Second, those “lost earnings” are the same as all the bands claiming that every Napster play of one of their songs cost them as $16 album sale. There are always vacant rooms, so you have to count that against the income loss, and that means you have to estimate, and since the real economy is in the shitter, your estimate should include that.
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Covid would still have destroyed the travel and tourism industry if we had elected Clinton or even Jesus. People don’t travel if they are afraid to get sick and die.
I work in the industry. The end of year figures should be 500 billion dollars lost in the travel industry nationally, with 4.5 million jobs gone. That’s just since March.
In my state, PA, a 40 billion dollar tourism economy will be lucky to be a 25 to 30 billion dollar one at the end of the year. Depends upon ski season. But the governor, who just announced he has covid, is shutting the state down until next month, so not much hope there.
It’s widespread devastation that has been mostly under the radar. The USTA predicts the industry won’t recover until 2024 or 2025.
Pretty sure Jesus would have just cured the pandemic, or at least implemented free socialized medicine. And Clinton would have at least followed the science and not claimed that covid would go away on its own. Please don’t make false equivalencies.
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I believe the industry would have been less impacted if our federal government had taken COVID seriously and taken significant steps to squash it (mandated masks and social distancing, crash program on vaccine, don’t encourage stupid behavior). We could have been much further along the road to recovery with a better governmental response.
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In before @anon29537550;
IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!
IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!
IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!
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Wrong: the industry would have been impacted, but not necessarily severely. Wages could have been covered for a honest and scientifically managed lockdown, followed by serious mitigation actions that would have helped control any new outbreaks with a minimum of disruption. Other countries have done this. Our government and conservative media chose not to.
300,000 Americans are dead, absolutely no national containment effort for 9 months and the PA tourism economy is still running at nearly 75%? If that’s with literally the worst federal response imaginable, then hell, President Mitt Romney could have “saved” the PA tourism economy.
It did not have to be like this.
One, I wish people were afraid, but I wish they would be afraid that they would get other people sick and kill them. And care. Maybe too much to ask for in this country. And certainly, Thanksgiving demonstrated that this was not true.
The main reason follows from the White House and conservative media, along with most state governments, intentionally screwing up the initial response in order to “save the economy”.
Here’s the “saved economy”:
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2020
Thursday Is New Jobless Day
853K new lucky duckies.
by Atrios at 09:27
Unemployed people don’t make good tourists.
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Guess who has two thumbs and was planning to buy a small owner run resort in 2020 but procrastinated long enough for the pandemic to hit before losing all his money, this guy.
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Surely the tourism industry should shut down during a … pandemic?
Are we still arguing about this?
Doesn’t everybody know it’s worse now than it was in April?
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The CEO of Visit Philadelphia has a much rosier assessment for the Greater Philadelphia Area. At least he did when I spoke to him yesterday.
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I guess we should just add COVID to the pile of stupid senseless ongoing tragedies that other countries have figured out how to respond to, but America for whatever reason* is incapable of. 
* the reason is money. it’s always money.
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Those poor bed bugs
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Well, also racism and grievances about the possibility of loosing a de facto white nationalist government to the changing demographics of the US.
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