As tourism has tumbled amid the COVID-19 crisis, waves of hotels across B.C. have emptied of guests and then shuttered their doors. “Every day has been a little bit more surreal, quite honestly,” Eldorado Resort general manager Brent Lavery said. “The morning that we wake up to today, tomorrow is a different morning, and a different set of circumstances that we’re having to deal with.” Brent Lavery, the general manager of Kelowna’s recently-closed Hotel El Dorado, said he’s had to lay off the vast majority of his staff. “My career has taken me through 9/11.
It’s taken me through SARS and the economic meltdown of 2008/2009, but this is unprecedented,” he said. The British Columbia Hotel Association estimates that as more and more hotels