- Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson said coronavirus ‘is like nothing we’ve ever seen before’ and is having a greater toll than World War II on the hotel industry
- He axed his own salary and slashed senior exec salaries by 50% Friday
- Goldman Sachs predicted that a record 2.25 million Americans could enter claims for unemployment benefits this week
- This dwarfs Labor Department figures reported Thursday that applications had surged by 70,000 to 281,000 last week
- This would also be the highest number of unemployment claims in US history, dwarfing the previous record of nearly 700,000 back in 1982
- Best Western CEO David Kong warned that ‘this is the worst decline that the [hotel] industry has ever seen’, with sales plummeting by 40 percent in a week
- Hotel bosses met with President Trump on Tuesday, urging him to grant the industry a $150billion bailout to prevent more mass layoffs of staff
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The CEO of world’s largest hotel group Marriott has said that coronavirus is worse than the Great Depression and World War II and has cut his salary to $0 as the hospitality industry continues to be devastated by the pandemic.
This comes as Goldman Sachs warned that unemployment claims have already risen to two million across the US, with thousands of Americans finding themselves jobless overnight.
This would mark the highest level of unemployment ever seen in US history, dwarfing the previous record of nearly 700,000 unemployment claims back in 1982 and sparking fears the nation is entering a recession.
The hospitality industry has been one of the hardest hit, with the CEO of major hotel chain Best Western also warning Friday that ‘it’s very bad… this is the worst decline that the industry has ever seen’.