Consumer Behaviour of Generation Y and Z during the Pandemic: Attitude Change towards Restaurants and Delivery

Abstract

With the appearance of the coronavirus, companies across several industries were required to alter their business models in order to avoid going bankrupt. Hospitality is commonly considered as one the most vulnerable industry for pandemics, therefore the decline on a global scale was inevitable. The occupancy rate of European hotels experienced an overall significant decline in 2020 and reached the lowest peak in May at 13.3%. Compared to the data from May 2019, this meant a drop of 82.3%. Restaurants also felt the negative effect of the pandemic: compared to the data of 2019, at the end of February, European restaurants started to experience declines on a daily basis. With the additional unfortunate events and governmental restrictions, not even in a single month were restaurants able to achieve the number of customers served that they reported in 2019. Even though restaurants on a global scale were seriously impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of delivery services and food delivery applications (FDAs) has significantly grown and the number of global customers is still increasing. The market size of the global online food delivery sector was 107.44 billion US Dollars in 2019 and expected to reach 154.34 by the end of 2023. There is a wide range of factors that influences consumer behaviour such as quality of information, the design and accessibility, reduction on waiting time and experiences regarding online orders. This research aims to uncover the significance of these dimensions with the support of a primary research conducted in Hungary in order to discover whether the international trends are also applicable in the country.