As California looks to combat rising Covid-19 cases with strict stay-at-home mandates, hoteliers across the state are bracing for a bleak holiday season.
As of Monday evening, Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley in the central part of the state had enacted regional stay-at-home orders, which prohibit private gatherings of any size and restrict nonessential businesses from operating for an initial three-week period. Five counties in the Bay Area, San Francisco among them, have also enacted the order ahead of a regionwide mandate, which is automatically triggered when a region has fewer than 15% of its ICU beds available.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the orders are expected to be in effect across 28 counties, encompassing 84% of California's population, or 33 million people, by Tuesday.
For California hotels in impacted regions, it means a return to lockdown mode, with hospitality operators only permitted to offer accommodations for Covid-19 mitigation, containment and treatment measures; essential workers; or homeless and other vulnerable populations.
Under these restrictions, leisure travel of any sort is effectively banned through early January.
"Obviously we'd like to be open. But these mandates were expected by most people watching the spike in cases and positivity rates," said Pete Hillan, a spokesman for the California Hotel & Lodging Association (CHLA). "They haven't directly shut down the hotels, but we're preparing for a holiday season that has us closed for all but essential travel."
According to Hillan, California hotels won't be responsible for enforcement of the regional restrictions. The CHLA is encouraging its members to take an "informational" approach, ensuring that guests receive messaging on the stay-at-home mandates during the prebooking and booking process as well as at check-in.
"We have to be sensitive to privacy issues," explained Hillan. "We're not determining who is an essential or non-essential worker. Our role is to supply all the information that we can, so that travelers are adhering to the mandates."
Though tourism has remained relatively anemic across California throughout the pandemic, any trickle of leisure travel that the state's hotels may have anticipated over the next few weeks has now been stymied, creating what Hillan called "yet another burden" for hoteliers.
"We already have a number of our hotels that are at risk of having distressed loans," said Hillan, citing a recent American Hotel & Lodging Association member survey that showed that 59% of hotel owners are in danger of foreclosure by their commercial real estate debt lenders due to Covid-19.
Meanwhile, with Covid cases continuing to surge in California's other regions -- the remaining three being Greater Sacramento, the Bay Area and Northern California -- "the expectation now is that most of the state will also move into mandatory lockdown soon," said Hillan.
"Things are moving very quickly," he added. "[The stay-at-home orders] are evolving and will continue to evolve."