An Exploratory Study of Chain Hotels’ Crisis Management Practices in Mainland China Immediately after the COVID-19 Outbreak

This study aimed to explore chain hotels’ use of crisis management practices in mainland China during the first wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic (January–April 2020). It also investigated the relationship between crisis management practices and organizational factors (size, age, star rating, and ownership). The study adopted seven in-depth interviews during pilot study and then did an online survey, collecting 156 samples. Analysis of the collected data applied t-tests to validate the study’s four hypotheses regarding the relationships between organizational factors and crisis management practices across five dimensions (marketing, human resources, maintenance, government support, and operations). The results confirmed the four hypotheses. This research is the first initiative to explore the crisis management practices implicated by chain hotels in mainland China immediately after the COVID-19 outbreak, and it offers an essential contribution to the knowledge of how hotel factors influence hotels’ adoption of crisis management practices.