To make matters worse, survivors will most likely employ fewer staff. Undoubtedly, some hotels, restaurants, or pubs that have closed may never reopen. It is also apparent, however, that not everyone has the same capacity for recovery. It is obvious that the coronavirus affected, affects, and will affect all levels of the hospitality industry. Additionally, all citizens had to cancel non-essential travel, some of which will not be possible for many months ahead.
These regulations included steps to reduce social contact in hotels, bars, restaurants, pubs, cafeterias, bakeries, etc. With a huge number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths affecting the world’s population, governments worldwide have implemented strict social distancing regulations to help reduce the spread of the virus. This perspective is especially important while we are facing the next worldwide surge: the delta variant. In this paper, we present the possible cognitive bias that makes work in such an industry possible, but still potentially extremely dangerous. On the one hand, these people need to work for a living on the other hand, they need to stay alive and provide security for their families. These essential workers are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 infection since guest turnover is high. The goal of this paper is to bring this group into focus, especially those who work in the HoReCa industry: wait staff, bartenders, caterers, kitchen staff, etc. There is, however, another crucial front-line worker that seems to be overlooked: workers in the hospitality industry, without whom travelers could not stay in a hotel, eat in a restaurant, or have a drink in a pub. Someone has to work in healthcare businesses, and it is often easy to think of those as front-line workers. One should keep in mind that there is also another side to the story: workers becoming front-line soldiers to make the aforementioned services available. Taken together, both works may fill an important gap in research on COVID-19 from the perspective of a sustainable work and business environment. The rationale for this perspective is that the aforementioned seminal papers bring an individual perspective, whereas this study focuses on groups as a potentially important factor in the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, although it has been shown that mental health and coping with stress during the COVID-19 pandemic depends on the individual’s specific type of disease rather than their type of profession, in the present paper, we reverse this thinking by concentrating on a specific profession: restaurant workers. From this perspective, the hospitality industry was hit incredibly hard businesses have been or even will be closed for months revenue is lost, and customers may not come back for a long time. It has also been harder for many of us to do the things that normally help keep us well and to make plans about shopping and vacation/business trips. Additionally, some people have been unable to get to stores, while others need to purchase regular medicine but may not be able to order prescriptions by phone or online. Our routines have been deeply disrupted, some of us have experienced intense anxiety that destroys our day-to-day plans, while others suffer from isolation, uncertainty, boredom, and serious health concerns. The COVID-19 outbreak has deeply affected the world’s economy in general and the hospitality industry, in particular. What is more, we found that these unrealistic expectations are more pervasive: workers of the restaurant industry estimate low chances of bankruptcy, which may lead to unrealistic salary expectations, leading owners to a new upcoming wave of crisis: COVID-19 and bankruptcy-both of which may be caused by their workers. In the face of the delta variant, this leads to the conclusion that restaurants will be new hot spots. From the literature, we already know that individuals holding this view are less involved in preventive actions and present more risky behaviors.
We have found that HoReCa (hotels, restaurants, and catering services) workers, who are highly exposed to many new social interactions in close contact, present an unrealistic optimism (UO) bias: they perceive themselves as less at risk to this virus in comparison to others.
In the present paper, we present data that is alarming. As we are facing a new surge of the highly infectious delta variant of COVID-19, there is an urgent need for research to reduce the harm before this next wave hits.
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