Strategic Adaptation and Resilience During Armed Conflict: Cost Leadership and Informal Partnerships in the Hotel Sector of Ibb, Yemen

ABSTRACT Hotels operating under protracted armed conflict face persistent operational disruptions that differ fundamentally from the temporary shocks typically examined in hospitality crisis research. Yet limited empirical attention has been given to how cost‐oriented strategies interact with locally embedded adaptive mechanisms to sustain hotel operations when formal institutional support and conventional recovery pathways are constrained. Addressing this gap, this study examines how hotels in Ibb, Yemen, use cost leadership and informal partnerships to maintain business continuity during prolonged armed conflict. A qualitative case‐study design was employed, drawing on semi‐structured interviews with 20 hotel managers from three‐ and four‐star hotels. The data were analyzed thematically following Braun and Clarke's six‐phase approach, supported by NVivo, with triangulation, member checking, and contextual analysis used to strengthen the trustworthiness of the findings. Six interconnected themes emerged: operational disruptions, cost leadership strategies, internal organizational adjustments, effectiveness and morale, informal networks and partnerships, and crisis‐related learning. The findings show that hotel survival depended not simply on reducing costs, but on combining operational retrenchment including service simplification, local procurement, workforce flexibility, and energy‐saving practices with adaptive pricing, localized resource mobilization, and informal partnerships with NGOs and community actors. The study contributes to crisis‐management and hospitality‐resilience research by showing that, under prolonged conflict, cost leadership functions less as a conventional competitive positioning strategy and more as an operational survival mechanism embedded within locally coordinated adaptive responses. Practically, the findings highlight the importance of flexible cost structures, local supply networks, community partnerships, and decentralized adaptation for hospitality organizations operating under sustained institutional and infrastructural disruption.