After more than 70 days, the first hotels in China have reopened to receive visitors. The worst of the epidemic has just arrived in Latin America.

The tourism sector is one of the hardest hit economically by the development of this crisis.

Taking into account the evolutionary nature of the situation, it is too early to calculate the full incidence of COVID-19 in tourism and the many sectors that will be affected, such as those presented below:

Airline companies

When thinking about traveling to places outside our borders, we always think about traveling by plane.

Airports, businesses within them and the jobs of people in airline companies and air terminals have been affected.

Other areas that are directly hit are companies that provide ground transportation and vehicle rental services; and travel agencies, which depend specifically on the sale of tickets and various travel packages to different destinations.

Hotels chains and others

Hotel chains have taken different measures to try to stay afloat. From keeping tourists or people from other countries who cannot return to their places of origin.

And even as quarantine places for possible suspects of having the virus, as in the case of El Salvador.

Hostels and guest houses are closed until further notice. Even people who owned properties or rooms on APP’s like Airbnb are suffering losses.

Restaurants

For some of these, home delivery or takeaway have been two solutions that keep their businesses afloat during this crisis.

In other cases, such as restaurants within shopping malls, tourist centers or airports, they remain closed following the prevention guidelines that have been imposed in many countries.

This also represents significant losses for this sector in many aspects as consumers are reduced to less than 50%.

Tourism centers

The complete closings of national parks, tourist centers and even public recreation spaces were other measures that were implemented in different countries of Latin America.

The main problem was that with the termination of school and work activities, many people decided to take it as a vacation or recreation period.

However, many people such as guards, tourist guides, lifeguards and others have been seriously affected since their daily earnings depend mostly on how many visitors attend these places on a regular basis.

Informal business

Street vendors, food carts, souvenirs and others are businesses in the informal sector that are directly affected by this drop in tourism.

Considering that their daily income depends on the number of sales to tourists specifically, we see that many countries face an economic crisis like never seen before.

For this reason, in some tourist places there are still vendors and businesses that remain open, but without obtaining the necessary profits to survive.