Tourists are booking hotel stays during the summer travel season, but Maryland’s lodging industry still has ground to regain before it reaches pre-pandemic employment levels.
The industry is expected to close out 2021 with 7,400 fewer hotel jobs compared to 2019 employment levels, a new report from the American Hotel and Lodging Association predicts.
The projection mirrors a national trend for the hotel industry, which suffered from plummeting occupancy rates and steep job losses last year at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Nationwide, some 700,000 hotel workers lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic. While some of those jobs have since been restored, the AHLA predicts that one in five U.S. hotel workers — an estimated 500,000 people — still won’t have returned to work by the end of this year.
