My profession is hotel and tourism management and for many years I have always worked in 4-5 star hotels. Last year I ended up with a property management position in a start-up company. I thought that my job was solid and nothing could bring me down.

But when the pandemic began I found that all the hotels in my portfolio started to not produce well. The number of bookings was decreasing every day until they turned to zero at the end. There had been no guests for a while but my company did not give us any signs. I was still enjoying working on preparations for the new hotel partnership to set up and establish within our brand. Our department has three people including me. Then there’s my buddy who is another property manager and our photographer.

One day someone from our headquarters came to interview all of us. A couple of weeks later they called my team members except me, into the meeting room with other employees. We were all thinking about “employee terminations.”

“The Survival”
The Thailand branch of our company resized. Seventy-five percent of employees were terminated “without further notice.” After that, they made us part of the headquarters team. Even my supervisor also had to return to his country and they sent someone to take care of our branch, but I never thought that he was sent to shutdown the Thailand branch.

“Shutdown”
I was the only one left working in my team. Another team had three people working. We got an assignment day by day until we heard from the headquarters. I was told to break all the contracts with vendors and partners. It was so painful to hurt all the people who trusted me and believed in my abilities to support them. I was the last one who worked in the company until the last day of the shutdown.

Finding a new job during a pandemic is not easy, especially for me with very strong experience in the hotel front office department. This is because all the hotels had shutdown. I had to re-brand and re-position myself in the labor market. I decided to join a nonprofit organization and it seems great. I’m so lucky that even during this difficult time I was still able to see my potential and not take so much time to cope with the situation.