Hotel jobs lost

One of New Zealand’s biggest hotel chains, Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, says it has cut hundreds of staff as a result of the effects of Covid19 on the tourism sector. The company began closing hotels not long after New Zealand entered level 4 lockdown in March. It said yesterday that it had been forced to make decisions about its workforce that had affected 70 per cent of its employees. Before the coronavirus pandemic, it employed over 1300 people at its hotels, chairman Graham McKenzie said. ‘‘We have lost and will be losing many long-serving and very loyal employees as a direct result of this crisis. We are sorry to see them go and hopefully we will see some of them again when tourism gets back to more normal levels.’’ The chain runs about 20 hotels in New Zealand.