The £12.4bn start-up, OYO Hotels has given its 300 UK employees a 30-day consultation period on redundancies, with 150-200 set to lose their jobs, as reported by Yahoo Finance.
Head of UK Hotels, Rishabh Gupta (pictured) wrote in an email sent to staff that the firm blamed the lay-offs on the impact of coronavirus, saying it 'has and will hit harder than all previous disruptions put together'.
He warned there was “still no clear signs or timelines for recovery. Unfortunately, this means we will need to enter into a consultation period in order to align the costs with the revenue available.'
Gupta wrote, “We have come to a point, given the market conditions, where we need to acknowledge that the market will not rebound soon enough to allow us to meet the levels set by our business plan.'
Gupta said that hotel occupancy across the UK had fallen by 80% since the start of the pandemic.
He concluded, “We not only need a plan to survive the immediate pandemic, but also sustain the long term reductions in the customer demand along with the other economic shocks that this pandemic has caused.'