Operations
Between historically low wages and a high-stress working environment, hotels are not always the first place jobseekers think to send their CVs. Yet if the scale of the problem is inescapable,
so too are attempts to fix it. In the first instance, that involves improving pay and conditions, with hoteliers hoping to lure staff away from other corners of hospitality. That’s shadowed by advertising campaigns, with industry insiders encouraging workers to try their luck in the sector.
“The lack of available labour is forcing hoteliers to take on less business than they normally would in order to maintain the same high levels of guest services.”
Chip Rogers And across it all is the rising tide of digitalisation,
new machines that promise to improve customer service even as staffing levels stay low. Not that even the most technically-advanced properties can hope to survive without some human workers to help things along.
Below: There is a 22% shortfall in hospitality workers in Europe.
Previous page: The Covid-19 pandemic began hospitality’s march towards a staffi ng crisis.
Shortage circuit No area of hospitality has avoided staffing challenges. Quite aside from that bewilderingly high American survey figure, that’s clear enough from the statistics. Across Europe, WTTC reports that there’s a 22% shortfall in hospitality workers, a figure that rises to as much as 40% in the UK from research by Koozai, a situation that’s persisted since the pandemic. And it’s 2020’s cataclysm, in fact, that starts explaining the industry’s current woes. With occupancy rates collapsing to just 11% in some places, according to Statista, operators
everywhere were forced to furlough or sack literally millions of workers. Across the US, for instance, hospitality would ultimately cull some ten million jobs in 2020 alone, as rooms remained empty and workers were left with little to do. Yet if Covid-19 began hospitality’s march towards
a staffing crisis, it’s presumably not the only factor at play. Apart from stubborn holdouts like China, after all, lockdowns are now a thing of a past, even as guests return in huge numbers. For Liang Yu, a professor of hospitality management at George Washington University, that apparent disconnect can be understood in a single word: wages. He describes hospitality as “one of the lowest paid service sectors in the economy,” while countries like Britain employ upwards of a quarter of hospitality workers on insecure and badly paid zero-hour contracts. It hardly helps, Yu continues, that hospitality is often such a demanding sector to make a career in. “Workers have to regulate their emotions on a daily basis when they go out to work,” he stresses, “even though they may have something bothering them at home.” Whatever the causes, at any rate, it’s clear that the impact of these shortages are increasingly stark. As Chip Rogers explains, that’s anyway apparent for hoteliers themselves. “The lack of available labour is forcing hoteliers to take on less business than they normally would in order to maintain the same high levels of guest services,” explains Rogers, CEO and president at the AHLA. And in cases where operators are less scrupulous, trying to welcome the same number of guests with workers inevitably causes issues too. From waiting longer for room service to only getting your room cleaned once every few days, Yu says that some of the austerity measures imposed during the pandemic look set to stay.
Ruled by robots If you take a trip to New York, you might notice something unusual. Travel to the Moxy, a slick Marriott property near Times Square and you won’t be welcomed by the usual coterie of receptionists and bellhops. Indeed, you won’t necessarily get a flesh-and-bone interaction at all. While a manned customer service desk still exists, you’ll actually check into your room via a machine, a so-called contactless arrival kiosk, which apart from issuing keys in less than a minute can also disinfect itself. Initially introduced to please germ-conscious guests during the pandemic, the machines have actually been deployed in more recent times too and now grace Marriott hotels as far afield as Florida and Louisiana.
34 Hotel Management International /
www.hmi-online.com
Dragon Images/
Shutterstock.com
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