Cagayan de Oro hotels cry SOS after months of ECQ

Months of restrictive quarantine protocols in Cagayan de Oro have crippled the local hotel industry.

The Cagayan de Oro Hotel and Restaurant Association (COHARA), in a letter to the regional Inter-Agency Task Force last September 24, said many of the hotels in the city would have to stop operations or close shop if quarantine conditions would continue to be implemented in the city.

“May we request some reconsiderations be amended in order to aid the survival and recovery of our industry,” COHARA president Eduardo Pelaez said in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Rappler.

Pelaez said local hotels suffered substantial economic losses not only during the months that enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) measures were implemented but since the pandemic started in 2020.

“For two years, hotel owners bore the brunt of paying our employees even though we were closed most of the time,” hotel manager Ami Saniel said.

In her case, Saniel said, her staff of 100 was reduced to only five because her hotel and its restaurant were closed.

She said the hotel and her remaining employees adopted a flexible arrangement, taking turns who will work.

“No owner can survive two years without business income. That is what is happening to all the hotels in Cagayan de Oro,” Saniel said.

COHARA proposed that hotels be allowed to accept guests regardless of age as long as the customers have already been administered with their first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Pelaez said that way, hotels can survive the economic fallout.

To ensure health protocols, Pelaez said, hotels and restaurants would have to be allowed to operate at 50% of their customer capacities.

The Department of Interior and Local Government has favorably endorsed COHARA’s proposal to the regional IATF.

May Salvaña-Unchuan, Department of Tourism Northern Mindanao director, said she would meet with hoteliers this week so they can find ways to ease their economic burden.

“We understand their position. They have suffered long enough,” Unchuan said.

Unchuan said one of the problems they have identified is local government’s varying implementation of IATF quarantine procedures.

“Some LGUs go easy with their hotels while others are very strict,” she said.

Unchuan said Cagayan de Oro is one of the strictest implementers of quarantine measures after the city was wracked by triple digit infections in the past months in 2021.

She said they have given aid to the hotel employees but they understand that this is not enough.

As of July 15, 2021, the National Economic and Development Authority in Northern Mindano said some 6,534 workers in the hotel industry in the region have been affected by lay-offs and flexible work arrangements.

Cagayan de Oro has eased into the less strict general community quarantine, though still with heightened restrictions, until October 31. –Rappler.com

Froilan Gallardo is a Mindanao-based journalist and an awardee of the Aries Rufo Journalism Fellowship.