Here is three key priorities that every hotel owner, operator or investor must be doing right now if they want to emerge ahead of the pack from this pandemic:

1. Not how can I get further state aid (furlough scheme and other state bailouts) but where exactly is my ideal short-term business coming from? Call every past customer (leisure, group or business), recommender or influencer and make them an immediate offer that is blazingly obviously in their self-interest to buy from you now.
2. Your best source markets for future business are highly unlikely to be the same that we started 2020 focusing on. Think local, act local. What can you do attract interest from the largest pool of your ideal local customers? Who are they? Where do they reside? What do they read? Who do they listen to? Who do they seek for reassurance about the quality and safety of products and services they purchase? How can they reach you and you reach them fast?
3. Create new innovative products, services and relationships now with very clear immediate and relevant benefits to your ideal local customers.
4. Rapidly segment businesses that are (1) ideally placed to bounce back fast, (2) those that need some immediate work on but you are confident can, and (3) those that definitely won’t fit your future commercial and operational imperatives. Prioritise capital, people, time, energy and so forth to the first group alongside clear objectives, accountabilities, and deadlines. With the second group, identify what improvements are required, when and who is best placed to make that happen. Get cracking. Finally, ruthlessly make plans to transition those assets or businesses. What must move out? How do you best accomplish that with minimal frictional cost and disruption to the rest of the business? Don’t delay, this is a period to be ruthless with your time and energy more than money. Move fast.

Where are you, in each category, at any specific point in time?

The UK Government loves setting arbitrary numerical targets (Covid-19 testing, immigration, hospital waiting lists) but does it makes sense? Invariably, they miss them or squeeze past them and there is a political dispute about the accounting.

In an entrepreneurial business, what is the point of targets if given the prevailing conditions you could easily have exceeded them but chose to relax, or your failure to reach them, by common consensus, is a relative success? Are you to be applauded or beaten with a stick?

The only target that actually matters is “maximum performance”
(sales, revenues, profits and so on) under the prevailing conditions. Everything else is “noise”.