What Hospitality Can Learn From Boston’s Comeback Plan

Boston travel organizations know they have a giant thorn from their past to overcome for state officials to green light a plan to once again allow the private events and meetings the state’s largest hotels need in order to survive.

Release time : 2020-07-14 10:29:33

source : Skift

Boston travel organizations know they have a giant thorn from their past to overcome for state officials to green light a plan to once again allow the private events and meetings the state’s largest hotels need in order to survive.

A Biogen conference at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf hotel in late February has been labeled an early coronavirus superspreader event — tied to cases both in Massachusetts as well as across the U.S. and Europe when attendees returned home. Massachusetts, one of the hardest hit in the U.S. during the coronavirus pandemic, eventually went into one of the toughest state-mandated lockdowns in the U.S. and has since seen its new case count plummet while other regions see their confirmed cases soar.

Massachusetts entered the third phase of its economic reopening this week, enabling indoor dining and many tourist attractions to reopen. But Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration has capped indoor event capacity to 25 people, well below the range hotels need in order to make money.

The state’s travel leaders’ pitch to once again allow indoor events could set a precedent for the hoteliers in hard-hit areas around the world.

“Many of these hotels can’t open until they can host meetings. They can’t sustain themselves on the current market mix of small corporate travel and leisure business,” said Martha Sheridan, president of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau. “To reopen, they’d need assurances they can host larger groups than 25 people.”

Sheridan along with the leaders of businesses and organizations like the Massachusetts Health Council, the Cambridge Office for Tourism, and five of Boston’s convention hotels — including three Marriott-affiliated properties — submitted a request to the Baker administration to allow bigger events to happen across the state. But these events would look a lot different than the impacted Biogen conference from