The Impact of Russian Plane Crash and COVID-19 Pandemic on the Evolution of Hospitality Industry in Egypt since 2013: A case study on applications of Crisis Management

Abstract

Egyptian hospitality industry is subjected to many challenges and crises throughout the periods after the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. The riots and instability resulted in many incidents that had direct impact on the tourism especially the leisure activities in Sharm El Shiekh. This is in addition to the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 and it consequence on transportation and world economy. These challenges require crisis management practices that are allow going through the difficult times with minimum damages and to save the investment. The present study analyzes the monthly financial and managing data in two hotels (A and B) that are situated in Sharm El Shiekh in the time period from January 2013 to December 2020. The analysis by constrained single linkage cluster analysis revealed the similarity between the statuses of the successive months and allowed the identification of five stages in studied time interval. These stages are Stage 1: Recovery from Egyptian 2011 Revolution turmoil (2013-2015), Stage 2: Russian Plane Crash (2015-2016), Stage 3: stable recovery from the Chaos (2017-2020), Stage 4: COVID-19 pandemic (2020) and Stage 5: recovery from COVID-19 pandemic. Each of these stages has some financial and administrative characters that affected the paths of both hotels. The analysis indicated that Hotel A kept higher efficiency and better performance than this of Hotel B during and managed to have higher revenue after the strike COVID-19 crisis.