Image Credit: Booking.com

By Ashley Legassic

COVID-19

Kamloops’s downtown Delta Hotel closes amid COVID-19 concerns

Mar 17, 2020 | 6:42 PM

KAMLOOPS — Concerns over a global pandemic and its impact on the local tourism industry has led to the temporary closure of a Kamloops hotel.

Delta Hotel Kamloops general manager Bryan Pilbeam says closing the downtown hotel was a difficult decision.

“It’s been a long week, quite frankly, we’ve been working through a number of iterations and contingency plans for what COVID-19 will bring to our community and to our industry and our business,” Pilbeam says. “Working through that over the weekend and up to yesterday and today, this morning we unfortunately had to make the decision that it was the right thing to do to take the extraordinary action of closing the Delta Kamloops and that will be effective Thursday.”

March started out optimistic for the hotel, but things quickly took a turn when COVID-19 cases began ramping up and travel restrictions were put in place.

“We’ve only got a handful of guests — we started off the first half of March at about 60 per cent occupancy which is a decent March, and we have lots of business on the books going forward to the spring, but that quickly went from 30 per cent to 20 per cent to 10 per cent and as of this morning we had four per cent occupancy for the rest of the month,” Pilbeam says. “So there really isn’t too many left and those that are here we’ll speak to personally and the reservations that we do have on the books we really just feel are ones that haven’t yet cancelled. So it is that bleak.”

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Pilbeam is hopeful the closure is temporary, and hopes federal and provincial governments will deliver on funding to local businesses and impacted employees.

“We know that the government has additional aid that’s coming, we just don’t have all the details as far as working through to employment insurance and everything else to get through this unprecedented situation.”

Pilbeam adds that he hopes extraodinary measures being taken across the city, province and country, help flatten the curve of COVID-19.