Hospitality and tourism job postings have tumbled 60%, more than any other sector — and it highlights the outsized damage of the coronavirus on the travel industry

A new report by economists at Hiring Lab found that job postings by hospitality and tourism companies on Indeed.com are down 63% compared to the same time period last year.
While US job postings have declined overall, the travel industry has been hit particularly hard due to stay-at-home orders and social distancing mandates .
To keep the industry afloat, a handful of initiatives including Buy Now, Stay Later , a hotel bonds program, have emerged in recent weeks.
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While overall hiring across industries in the US has declined during coronavirus outbreak, the travel and hospitality sectors have been hit particularly hard, according to a report released today by the economists at Hiring Lab.

From February 1 through April 10, 2020, overall US job postings on Indeed.com decreased 31% compared to the same time period in 2019, Hiring Lab found. The decrease in hospitality and tourism job postings was more that twice that, down 63% year-over-year. Indeed.com, which touts that it receives 250 million unique visitors each month and posts 10 jobs every second globally, is "a real-time measure of labor-market health," the Hiring Lab report notes.

Hiring Lab also found that US job postings declined the most in metro areas that are highly dependent 0n tourism, including Las Vegas and Honolulu. Smaller areas that experienced significant declines include popular ski and beach vacation destinations like Breckenridge and Steamboat Springs in Colorado and Key West, Florida .

Hiring Lab's findings support earlier predictions about the impact of the coronavirus outbreak

Last month, Chip Rogers, President and CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA), said that the effect of virus on the hospitality industry would be worse than "September 11th and the great recession of 2008 combined." An Oxford Economics study released mid March in partnership with the AHLA projected that four million US hotel jobs could be eliminated in the coming weeks.

Since then, major hospitality brands like Marriott and Hilton have furloughed tens of thousands employees and reduced executive salaries as travel comes to a halt. An estimated 95% of Americans have now been ordered to stay at home through a combination of state and municipal orders, and from April 5 to April 11, only 21% of US hotel rooms were occupied .

Though fewer companies are hiring amid furloughs and travel bans, a number of initiatives have emerged to support the travel industry in recent weeks. Programs like Buy Now, Stay Later allow travelers to purchase discounted hotel credits for future use, and major cities including Los Angeles and Chicago are renting hotel rooms in order to house coronavirus patients, homeless residents, and first responders. Though hotels have received support through the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, the AHLA has asked for $250 billion in additional aid on behalf of smaller hospitality businesses.

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