Exploring the Resilience of 3–5 Harare Hotel Restaurants: Key Issues and Challenges

The study sought to explore the resilience of 3–5-star Harare hotel restaurants, focusing on key issues and challenges. The research addresses the resilience aspect of hotel restaurant operation, which is sparsely studied in Zimbabwe. Additionally, the study aimed to determine the effectiveness of strategies implemented at Harare 3–5 star hotels to overcome the key food and beverage issues and challenges. This qualitative research adopted a case study approach and used convenient sampling through three lenses of food and beverage managers and employees and Zimbabwe Tourism Authority employees as the key informants of the study. Based on the data obtained from interviews with ten participants, the study found out that the 3–5 star Harare hotel restaurants’ key issues and challenges identified were a high rate of power cuts, disruptive supply chain, hiring and retaining skilled staff, stiff competition, change in consumer needs, retaining loyal customers, economic recession, and obsolescence of kitchen equipment. Furthermore, the 3–5 star Harare Hotel restaurants enhance resilient strategic competitiveness by capacitating its employees with on- and off-house training programmes, menu modification, collaboration with suppliers and the industry’s key players helping employees to overcome customer service challenges, offering outdoor catering, and enhancing quality service for customers as an attraction that supports its local community. However, the 3–5 star Harare hotel restaurants lacked training and development policies on employee career development, employees’ retirement plans and lag behind in technology advancement. The study’s implications are that adopting resilience strategies will enhance the performance of the 3–5 star Harare hotel restaurant, improve job retention, and act as a fertile ground for sustainable competitive advantage. The study suggested that 3–5 star Harare Hotel restaurants motivate their employees, increase pay, constant price evaluation, adopt new technological equipment, continuously train employees, and collaborate with hotel restaurants higher and tertiary institutions relationships to enhance the resilience of the next professional skill generation in restaurant operations, business-to-business partnerships which provide continuity in business profitability, and going green to ensure sustainable operations among the 3–5 star Harare hotel restaurants.