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Hotel Operators Prepare for a Peak Summer Travel Season That May Never Check In

Cameron Sperance

Photo Credit: Seasonal hotel owners and operators of properties like the AWOL in Provincetown (pictured), are moving ahead with opening plans as much as shelter-in-place orders allow.  AWOL Provincetown / Read McKendree

Skift Take

Seasonal hotels risk not surviving to see 2021 if governments don't allow some level of business to return this summer.

Seasonal hotels normally would be revving up now in preparation for an onslaught of summer travelers. But this year, there is uncertainty in whether summer travel will be a pent-up rush or a slow trickle. Coronavirus fears and precautionary measures sent the U.S. travel industry into a nosedive in March, a month when many seasonal hotel owners begin to prepare properties for the peak summer travel season. But shelter-in-place orders around the country and construction moratoriums in places like Pennsylvania and the Bay Area hinder the ability to throttle into a peak season that may never arrive. Hotel operators say they are still ready to open for summer, but the question is when their local governments will let them. “If we miss July, August, and September, we’ve missed 75 percent of the revenue stream for those properties that are our six-month seasonal properties,” said Peter Twachtman, CEO of northeastern U.S. hospitality company Lark Hotels.

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Lark Hotels closed all its properties on March 18 and furloughed 150 employees, keeping a skeleton staff to look after each hotel. The executive team took pay cuts, and the company then applied for Paycheck Protection Program Loans for each of its hotels in areas like Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Southern Maine Coast. “We’ve buckled down and tightened up expenses,” Lark Hotels founder and President Ro

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