Walt Disney has announced it is making 28,000 job losses from its theme park business showing that global hospitality businesses are far from immune to the Covid-19 crisis.

Ongoing diminished footfall at their reopened theme parks has forced senior management to take steps to reduce their salary costs alongside falling revenues.

The news broke earlier this week when US media giant CNBC, a provider of global business news and real-time financial markets ‘obtained’ a letter to staff from Josh D’Amaro, head of theme parks at Disney.

The letter was emotional and stressed the efforts senior management at Disney had gone to to avoid job losses. In the letter D’Amaro stated: “For the last several months, our management team has worked tirelessly to avoid having to separate anyone from the company. We’ve cut expenses, suspended capital projects, furloughed our cast members while still paying benefits, and modified our operations to run as efficiently as possible, however, we simply cannot responsibly stay fully staffed while operating at such limited capacity.”

Disney lost $4.72 billion in their second financial quarter of 2020, the company’s first quarterly loss in nearly two decades.