The year 2020 will be remembered as the biggest shake-up our industry has ever suffered.

Travel came into a complete stop for the first time in the modern world. Airplanes were grounded, and most hotel rooms were vacant. While the magnitude of the impact is clear, its speed was equally brutal. No one foresaw in late 2019 that something like this could happen. In budgetary terms, it will probably be our biggest deviation.

Today, we know much more about the pandemic than we knew initially, though many questions remain unanswered. For example: At which speed will vaccination advance? How long will immunity last? Will countries continue to restrict traveling? Will there be a new normal or are we going back to the old normal?

This level of uncertainty makes budgeting for your hotels in 2021 a complex exercise. Usual forecasting practices are useless when so much is uncertain and out of our control. In many ways, forecasting during a pandemic feels like building a plane while flying it.

To ease the conversation on projecting a financial outcome for 2021, I am recommending these four practices.

It is impossible to forecast with the overabundance of scenarios available. Assume, based on the overall scientific community consensus, vaccine deployment, quarantine projections and regulatory issues — such as flights and capacity limitations — and then move on. Your boss and owners should acknowledge your projections rest on those assumptions.

Performance in 2021 will depend more on market recovery than on strategy. Based on your above-mentioned assumptions, hypothesize what you think overall demand and your competitive set will look like next year. Make that forecast explicit on your budget.

Show what recovery will look like for your property in terms of penetration. What particularities does your property have that relate to a faster or slower recovery? What is your strategy to win? Public health crisis plus economic recession means demand will be low and uncertain. Next year, therefore, will be about competitiveness.

With such uncertainty, adaptability is more important than accuracy. Forecast labor in terms of productivity and feature costs as a percentage of revenue and/or per occupied room. It is likely we will err on the revenue forecast, so the challenge will be rapid cost adjustment.

Uncertainty and lack of control makes it hard to do the traditional growth-over-last-year budgeting processes. Therefore, owners will prefer planning over speculating. My preferred plan consists of commercial resilience, which means recovering faster and better than the market, and operational adaptability — swiftly reacting to revenue fluctuations. Today, the ability to handle the unknown is better than proficiency at what we already know.

Hugo Desenzani is chief executive officer of Intursa (Libertador Hotels, Inversiones La Rioja), a Peruvian hospitality group and the largest owner of Marriott-branded hotels in South America.

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