Overcoming the unprecedented: Micro, small and medium hospitality enterprises under COVID-19.

The sudden irruption of COVID-19 has paralysed, even devastated, numerous industries. Academic and industry publications also convey the destructive impacts of this phenomenon on hospitality and tourism businesses. While business owners and managers are still constrained by unpredictability, restrictions, and ongoing uncertainty, those vying to continue will need to build their adaptive skill repertoire to cope with the crisis-related regime. This study is primarily concerned with businesses' adaptation phase from owners/managers' viewpoints, including how they manage and envision a future coexistence with COVID-19 threats. Drawing on an international sample of owners/managers of hospitality and tourism businesses, and considering the foundations of the dynamic capabilities framework, eight dimensions emerged from the findings. Five of these, persevering, dynamic, austere restrictions, business environment, and stakeholder, strongly suggest the relevance of reconfiguring, a cluster of dynamic capabilities. Together, the dimensions demonstrate participants' strong commitment to navigate through the threat while pursuing socioeconomic sustainability.

Entrepreneurial action and unprecedented uncertainty: The cases of New South Wales regional hospitality and tourism firms

The purpose of this study is to deepen emerging knowledge concerning the experiences of hospitality and tourism businesses operating in a regional setting in dealing with the uncertain environment caused by the COVID-19 crisis. Considering the conceptual pillars of entrepreneurial action, the study proposes a theoretical framework that extends the understanding of this unsettling and fluidly emerging phenomenon from a firm perspective. On-site, face-to-face interviews with ten owners and managers in regional New South Wales, Australia, contributed to the development of four different conceptual dimensions. First, the non-action-driven opportunity dimension underscores unintended positive outcomes from the crisis, while a second, action-driven opportunity illustrates initiatives business owners/managers implement to anticipate, minimise or exploit emerging opportunities. Third, the non-action-driven threat dimension is associated with negative outcomes from the crisis, and the last, strategy-driven opportunity, suggests changes, for instance, in firms? business model with the goal of creating future opportunities.

COVID-19, aftermath, impacts, and hospitality firms: An international perspective.

Drawing on the theory of resilience, and on an international sample of 45 predominantly small hospitality businesses, this exploratory study extends knowledge about the key concerns, ways of coping, and the changes and adjustments undertaken by these firms' owners and managers during the COVID-19 outbreak. The various emergent relationships between the findings and the considered conceptual underpinnings of the literature on resilience, revealed nine theoretical dimensions. These dimensions critically illuminate and extend understanding concerning the actions and alternatives owners-managers resorted to when confronted with an extreme context. For instance, with financial impacts and uncertainty being predominant issues among participants, over one-third indicated actioning alternative measures to create much-needed revenue streams, and preparing for a new post-COVID-19 operational regime, respectively. Furthermore, 60 percent recognised making changes to the day-to-day running of the business to respond to initial impacts, or biding time in anticipation of a changing business and legal environment.