Strategic Crisis Management Across Pre-, During-, and Post-Crisis Phases: Strategic Insights from Jakarta’s Five-Star Hotels

Crisis management has become a critical strategic concern in hospitality, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed limitations in conventional approaches to preparedness, response, and recovery. Although existing hospitality crisis management research has generated valuable insights into individual crisis phases, a limited understanding exists regarding how preparedness, crisis response, and organizational learning interact as an integrated strategic process across the crisis lifecycle. Addressing this gap, this study examines strategic crisis management within Jakarta’s five-star hotel sector and develops an integrated understanding of crisis management across pre-crisis, during-crisis, and post-crisis phases. A constructivist grounded theory approach was employed based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 25 senior hospitality leaders, including hotel executives, owners, and industry association representatives. The findings suggest that crisis management is best understood as an integrated strategic capability rather than a series of discrete emergency responses. Three interrelated theoretical dimensions emerged: Continuous Strategic Preparedness, characterized by adaptive readiness, environmental sensemaking, decision readiness, and financial preparedness; Coordinated Strategic Crisis Response, encompassing liquidity discipline, operational adaptation, workforce adaptability, leadership coordination, and cross-functional alignment; and Strategic Renewal Through Organizational Learning, involving the retention of effective crisis practices, capability strengthening, and strategic reorientation toward ongoing uncertainty. The study proposes an Integrated Strategic Crisis Management Framework for Hospitality Organizations that explains the mechanisms linking preparedness, response, and organizational learning as a cyclical capability-building process. By reconceptualizing crisis management as an integrated strategic capability rather than a phase-based operational response, the study contributes to hospitality crisis management scholarship and provides practical insights for hospitality organizations operating in increasingly uncertain environments.