Dijana Čičin-Šain

Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic caused the most severe demand shock in the global hotel industry's recorded history, but its financial consequences were not equally distributed across firms. This study aims to examine whether hotel business model structure, specifically the degree of asset-light orientation, predicts the timing of financial recovery. The analysis uses a 15-year (2010–2024) Bloomberg panel of publicly listed hotel companies. Business model scores are measured from Bloomberg segment revenue filings wherever segmentation separately identifies fee, property, and zero-margin reimbursement revenue, and by the structured classification otherwise, with treatment anchored at pre-crisis (2019) values. Two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences estimates show that asset-light companies outperformed asset-heavy peers by 13.5 percentage points in EBITDA margins during the 2020–2021 crisis (p = 0.014). The event study shows this advantage is concentrated in the recovery year rather than the shock year: both groups collapsed comparably in 2020, asset-light margins recovered to near pre-crisis levels in 2021 while asset-heavy margins remained negative (+20.3 pp, p < 0.001), and the differential is no longer distinguishable from zero by 2022. The recovery premium is robust to region-by-year and pre-crisis-size controls and, separately, to restricting the treated group to segment-verified firms.

Acknowledgment
The author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Department of Economics, University of Zadar, which covered the article processing charge for this publication.