Large hotels and their employees face ongoing uncertainty.

If more hotel guests don’t start checking in by the end of this month, Pebble Beach Company may permanently lay off 500 employees – a third of the workforce – beginning Nov. 1. At least that’s what the company told the state’s Employment Development Department in a letter dated Sept. 1, a 60-day notice required under the federal WARN Act, or Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, for potential layoffs in certain circumstances.

“We are concerned that the Covid-19 pandemic and the related economic downturn will continue to have a significant impact on our business for months to come,” writes David Heuck, Pebble Beach Co.’s executive vice president and chief administrative officer.

It’s not certain that 500 employees will lose their jobs in November. Hector Azpilcueta of Unite HERE Local 483, a hospitality workers union that represents employees at the Lodge at Pebble Beach, believes the permanent layoffs most likely will not happen, and the company is complying with WARN Act rules just in case. Company President David Stivers tells the Weekly in a written statement that no decisions have been made yet.

Azpilcueta says that since the beginning of the pandemic when temporary layoffs took effect, about 40 to 50 percent of employees at the Lodge returned to work. That’s similar at hotels across the Monterey Peninsula, he says. Although the region saw an uptick in day visitors beginning in May, hotel occupancy was down by about half all summer compared to last year.

Portola Hotel in Monterey furloughed 300 employees immediately the week shelter-in-place began in March and has not reopened since. While other hotels have been able to open to tourists, the Portola depends on conferences at the Monterey Conference Center next door. General Manager Janine Chicourrat doesn’t see the Portola reopening until Monterey County is in the lowest of four tiers under the state’s pandemic reopening plan. (It’s currently in the highest tier.)

The bar to reopen just got higher on Oct. 6, when the state began using what it calls the Health Equity Metric in its calculations for whether counties may step down tiers. The metric takes into account the test positivity rate of disadvantaged neighborhoods. In Monterey County, test rates continue to be high for Latinos living in the Salinas Valley, but remain low on the Peninsula. Efforts by business and civic leaders to split the county have been unsuccessful – state officials are requiring counties to be treated as a whole.