Illinois hotel industry leaders are proposing the state using $250 million in leftover American Rescue Plan Act funding to give one-time grants of $1,500 per room for every hotel in Illinois.
“Throughout the last two years of the pandemic, our hotels have lost over $5.5 billion in room revenue and that’s not getting any better,” said Michael Jacobson, president and CEO of the. “We thought we would be well into the recovery phase by this point. Unfortunately, because of omicron and other conditions, we’re really back to square one. In fact the last two months, Chicago has been dead last in terms of hotel occupancy.
Jacobson attributes this shortfall in Chicago to the winter season, as well as COVID mitigations like the recently lifted vaccine and mask mandates., a Chicago-based hotel ownership and management company, says the funding would help draw back workers amid an ongoing workforce shortage. According to the Illinois Hotel & Lodging Association, over 40% of Illinois hotel jobs have been lost since the start of the pandemic.“We talked to both Democrats and Republicans about this and we’ve gotten some great buy-in from folks from all around,” Buckner said. “We’re talking about an industry that has $16 billion dollars in salary and wages.”
“Not only did some of our hotels not receive PPE loans, some of the larger downtown hotels were actually too large in 2019 to qualify for them,” Jacobson said. “But those are the ones that are continuing to hurt the most. Those are ones that saw occupancy rates in January in the 6 to 7% range.”
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