The Crowne Plaza Resort is seen from Main Street, Lake Placid, on Wednesday. (Enterprise photo — Elizabeth Izzo)

LAKE PLACID — Hoteliers across the country are fighting to keep their businesses open, struggling to attract travelers amid the coronavirus pandemic as bills come due. Lake Placid’s hospitality industry, however, is thriving.

Lake Placid hoteliers say travelers are coming in droves, and despite the ongoing pandemic, hotel rooms are filling up fast.

“Since we reopened on June 26, our business has been gangbusters,” Mirror Lake Inn spokesman Sandy Caligiore said. “We didn’t really know what to expect, but we’re very happy and grateful it has gone so well, especially after being closed for three months.”

Cristina Lussi, who heads sales and marketing at the Crowne Plaza Resort, said occupancy at the hotel is “remaining strong until the middle of October.”

“I was convinced that when Labor Day hit, we would die right off,” she said. “But our rooms are filled, and it’s busy.”

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo urged residents to stay home and signed his New York State on PAUSE order in March, directing the closure of all businesses except those deemed essential, tourism in the Adirondacks slowed to a near-nonexistent, sporadic trickle.

At that same time, Essex and Franklin County lawmakers urged visitors not to come here — and asked short-term vacation rental owners to stop accepting bookings — in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Many rental owners accepted bookings anyway, and some residents from other, more populous parts of the state chose to quarantine in the rural Adirondacks.

Lake Placid’s hospitality industry is largely run by local families who are long accustomed to seasonal business, setting the industry apart from other areas where hotels are often operated by third parties that rely on steady, year-round revenue.

David Gomlak, co-owner of TMax-n-Topo’s hostel in Lake Placid, said the stay-at-home directives came at the best time they could have. Tourism typically sags in the Adirondacks in March and April, when hiking conditions aren’t great and the weather is unpredictable.

“April is the slowest month of the year,” he said. “We generally plan on some vacations or renovations; then it picks up around Memorial Day.”

The stay-at-home recommendations stretched on for months with no end in sight. Some hotel owners chose to close their businesses to visitors altogether.

The Mirror Lake Inn, a luxury hotel that has welcomed guests to Lake Placid for more than 90 years, was among the first hotels in the area to close its doors in March.

Caligiore said the Inn has since invested $400,000 into hospital-grade cleaning. Additional safety protocols, plus employee training, were implemented in the spring, he said, and they’ve been “overwhelmingly received.”

The Crowne Plaza closed, too, according to Lussi.

Gomlak said he and his wife Terri, like many other business owners, used the opportunity to make some upgrades.

“We ended up totally renovating our kitchen,” he said. “In May, we had time to finish building the deck that we started last year.”

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Layoffs

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Though local hotels are thriving, the coronavirus pandemic has had an impact on workers in the hospitality industry.

The state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN Act, requires private businesses that employ 50 or more full-time workers to alert their employees and the state Department of Labor of things like mass layoffs or closures. Two Lake Placid hotels alerted the DOL of mass layoffs this year: the High Peaks Resort and the Crowne Plaza Resort. The High Peaks Resort reported that it planned to temporarily lay off 90 employees on March 20 because of the pandemic. Of those 90, 68 were laid off permanently on July 1, according to the business’ WARN filing. Twenty-two people were brought back to work.

The High Peaks Resort did not respond for comment by deadline.

In its filing, the Crowne Plaza Resort didn’t disclose the number of people who had been temporarily laid off on March 18 but noted that the layoffs were directly tied to the pandemic. No further filings indicating that those layoffs were permanent have been filed with the DOL.

Lussi acknowledged that most of the hotel’s staff were laid off but said that now the hotel is open again, staffing continues to be an issue.

“We’re sorely understaffed because everybody is,” she said.

Local hotels, restaurants and other businesses that largely rely on students with J-1 visas to round out their workforces in the summertime didn’t have those people to help this year. The federal government has suspended J-1 student visas.

“We have an amazing team that said, ‘We need to do anything to keep this hotel open and running,'” Lussi said. The hotel is so short-staffed this year that its managers have been cleaning rooms, cooking and doing other work usually reserved for their subordinates.

“It’s pretty heartening to see what a team we have pulling their weight.”

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Jobs

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While Lake Placid has quite a few large hotels, there are plenty of mid-size and small hotels, bed and breakfasts, motels and hostels that don’t employ enough people to trigger a mandatory WARN Act notice if they have laid off or furloughed staff. The impact of the coronavirus on this village’s hospitality industry is likely much more significant than public WARN notices can show.

In the North Country region, the hospitality industry accounted for 3,200 jobs as of last year, a number that was projected to grow, according to DOL data.

The hospitality and leisure industry in the North County region — which includes accommodations such as hotels and motels as well as food service, arts, entertainment and recreation — has added 500 jobs between March and August, the latest month for which data is available, according to DOL Labor Market Analyst Anthony Hayden of Saranac Lake.

Employment in that industry, in this region, is typically near seasonal lows in March and seasonal highs in August, he said. The added jobs between March and August doesn’t mean the industry is doing well.

“This does not indicate that the sector is doing well, as the job gain is a fraction of the normal March-to-April increase,” Hayden said.

Faced with overdue mortgage payments and property taxes, hotels nationwide are struggling to survive, according to the American Hotel and Lodging Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group.

A survey of more than 1,000 hoteliers conducted two weeks ago revealed that of those who responded, 68% reported having less than half of their pre-pandemic staff working full-time. Two-thirds of the hotel owners reported that they’d only be able to stay open for six more months at their current projected revenue and occupancy levels unless the federal government allocates funding for the hospitality industry in its next coronavirus relief package. More than 70% said they’d be forced to lay off even more staff if aid doesn’t come.

Lussi, in addition to her job at the Crowne Plaza, also sits on the board of IHG Hotels and Resorts, an international hospitality company.

“Many of my colleagues are dying in business,” she said. Hotels located in suburbs have been hit hard.

“These are real numbers, millions of jobs, and the livelihoods of people who have built their small business for decades, just withering away because Congress has done nothing,” AHLA President Chip Rogers said on a conference call with business leaders on Sept. 18. “We can’t afford to let thousands of small businesses die and all of the jobs associated with them be lost for many years.”