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Closures, curfews, travel bans: the hospitality industry has been severely affected by the pandemic
Photo: Hauke-Christian Dittrich / dpa
In the hospitality industry, sales have fallen by almost half since the beginning of the corona pandemic.
The Federal Statistical Office announced on Monday.
From March 2020 to January 2021, sales were 47 percent below the prior-year period.
Hotels, inns and guesthouses are particularly hard hit: There the minus was even 57 percent.
The number of employees has also fallen by almost a fifth.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, there has not been a month in which sales reached the level of the same month last year, the report says.
Although the slump in the lockdown months of April and December was particularly high, the recovery hoped for by the trades did not occur in the summer months either.
In August, the month with the highest sales in 2020, sales were 20 percent below those of the previous year.
Hotels suffer, campsites less
Not all businesses were equally affected by the break-ins.
In the hotel industry in particular, sales fell because there were no foreign guests and there were hardly any trade fairs or other major events.
Vacation rental operators fared slightly better, and there was a surprise at campsites: In summer and early autumn, their operators were even able to generate more sales than in the same period of the previous year.
In the entire pandemic period, sales were therefore only around ten percent lower than in the same period of the previous year.
Even within the catering trade, not all businesses suffered equally: Those who bet on serving drinks recorded high sales losses, in particular.
The decline in the number of employees was particularly high there.
On the other hand, some restaurants and bars were able to compensate for part of the failures with delivery services and to-go offers, where the loss in sales was below the industry average.
Employees in the hospitality industry receive gross hourly earnings below the low wage threshold more often than in any other economic sector.
In 2018, at the time of the last survey, 66 percent of all jobs in the hospitality industry were below the low wage threshold, according to statisticians.
The industry consists mainly of smaller companies with few employees: 72 percent of the companies had fewer than ten employees.
Of the total of 2.4 million employees in the hospitality industry, more than half work part-time.
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