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Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have experienced career shocks, especially employees in the hotel industry. To address how to retain talent in the industry, this study aims to examine the joint impacts of employee resilience, work social support and proactive personality on hotel employees’ career change intentions.

A survey questionnaire was developed to test the proposed framework. Data from 339 current hotel employees in the USA was analyzed using the PROCESS model.

Results show a significant three-way interaction, indicating that for less proactive employees, resilience is negatively associated with career change intentions. However, for highly proactive employees, an additional situation cue in the form of strong work social support is required to activate the expression of resilience. Highly proactive and resilient employees who receive strong supervisor or coworker support during the pandemic have lower career change intentions. However, highly proactive employees who receive weak supervisor or coworker support exhibit similar levels of career change intentions, regardless of resilience level.

Hotel managers should consider helping employees enhance their resilience and overcome career shocks by providing training and resources and establishing a learning culture. More importantly, it is essential to offer strong supervisor and coworker support to promote resilience among proactive employees. Hotel managers should actively promote strong work social support, and offer training and counseling opportunities to promote employee retention during the pandemic.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine employee resilience in the hospitality field. This study contributes to the employee resilience literature as well as trait activation theory by examining situational cues that can activate employee resilience and by providing empirical evidence to reveal the boundary conditions of how employee resilience impacts career change intentions.

The purpose of this study is to test the local impact of COVID-19 pandemic on hotel performance at the individual property level, and further examine the roles of hotel attributes and business mix in potentially moderating or intensifying the impact of a crisis.

Using a sample of 5,090 hotel properties in Texas, USA from January 2020 to December 2021, this study estimates a monthly hotel performance model to evaluate how the pandemic affected hotels’ operational performance based on revenue per available room.

Results show that a 10% increase in the monthly number of confirmed COVID-19 cases led to a 0.522% decrease in hotel performance. Also, a series of moderators were identified within the pandemic–performance relationship: the negative impact of the pandemic was more severe among higher-end hotels and newer hotels; urbanization and localization diseconomies prevailed during the pandemic; and there was a smaller negative effect of COVID-19 on high rated hotels in the category of economy hotels.

The moderators highlighted in this paper shed light on the heterogeneity of COVID-19’s effects on hotel operations. Findings enrich the hospitality literature by considering business resilience in relation to the pandemic.