Collaborative Operations of Hospitality In-dustry during COVID-19 Lockdown and Strategic Approach with reference to Bangalore, India

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought the entire world to a massive crisis of human illness, fatality, insecurity in family, business instability, and the downfall of the econ-omy, resulting in a huge number of job losses and pay cuts. The inadvertent consequences of COVID-19 started showing its effect in December 2019, and India started witnessing its spread by the end of February 2020 on-wards. The focus of this study was to find the impact of COVID-19 on the hospitality industry in India before and during the first lockdown and its collaborative operations with special reference to Bangalore. The methodology in-corporated in the study was the descriptive approach through the qualitative method, and the purposive sam-pling technique was utilised. It is evident that the hospi-tality industry was hit the hardest, as travel and stay of tourists plunged to an average of -60% change of occu-pancy data compared to the same period in 2019 in India, according to the STR reports. Due to this VUCA (Volatili-ty, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) environ-ment, the hospitality industry has initiated some collabo-rative operations to render their services to society and generously assist the government bodies. It is observed that the strategic collaborative frameworks can reduce the industry jolts during such disasters.