The Hotel Staffing Crisis Isn’t Going Away

by Robert McGarvey

The recent Reuters story’s headline has to push your worry buttons: No experience, no resume, you’re hired! Hotels fight for staff

Many eyes are glued to the ongoing crisis at airlines and airports – a London bookmaker should start taking bets on how many flights BA will cancel today. But it’s not one airline, seemingly all are imploding and many thousands of travelers find themselves in a quandary.

But a global economic slowdown will help cure these woes, as will the end of peak summer travel season. By October, even if airlines do nothing intelligent or positive, matters will become much less stressful.

As for hotels however it is hard to be sanguine. The industry faces a longterm problem. As Reuters reported, “Thousands of workers left the hospitality industry when international travel shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many chose not to return, finding better paid employment elsewhere, leaving hoteliers facing a desperate shortage.”

That’s the rub. Hotels have traditionally offered low wages, often for jobs with unpleasant working conditions.

Of course Japan already is operating hotels staffed primarily by robots and very probably that is the future for many hotels in the US – but that future is some years removed. The US hotel industry has a long history of under investing in infrastructure – see the decades of data leaks – and, absolutely, there already are robots that replace bartenders and robots that act as porters for delivery of room service meals and shifting baggage. There’s even a robot that can replace a hotel housekeeper.

Robots have a toehold in US hotels. Just don’t expect to see many soon.

Some of these devices cost in the six figures, nobody honestly knows the life expectancy of one, and given how hotels have struggled with high tech devices for a generation it is hard to see a smooth or graceful integration of robots into the daily operations of most hotels.

Turning more tasks into self-serve activities is another option, very probably the most likely to happen near-term. We can check ourselves into hotels, even provisioning ourselves with in app keys, for instance. I pretty much always carry my own bag to the room. And I am usually quite OK with housekeeping every other day. Realistically, however, what we will do for ourselves will represent a tiny amount of labor displaced onto our shoulders.

The reality: even with some robots and more DIY hotels will face continuing, huge staff shortfalls.

Can hotels in the US and in Europe hire and train enough staff to operate with at least a minimal level of service?

The short answer is of course they can. But they also have to change to become an employer of choice rather than the employer of last resort which often is what they are for many.

How to make hotel jobs more attractive?

For one thing, pay staff competitively. That means offering a range of benefits too – from paid sick days to paid holidays.

It also means training workers so that they can do their jobs at a satisfactory level. And keep training. Cross train a bar back to fill in as a restaurant waiter, for instance.

And it means increasing the attractiveness of the jobs – a lot of hospitality work just is not appealing and when work is unappealing, workers go elsewhere. Hotel managers need always to ask themselves: would I want this job?

Another step – already showing up in Europe – is to fill hotel jobs with more foreign workers but that likely means immigration policies would need to be relaxed and it is hard to see where the political will for that could be found. It’s a good idea – already helping in Germany and Spain to name two – but in the US immigration has been so thoroughly politicized we have slid into paralysis. I don’t see more foreign workers as a fix, certainly not in an election year.

Here’s the bottomline: today’s hotel staff shortages can be remedied but for there to be a real fix the industry has to accept that many of its jobs have a desirability problem, as in they are simply undesirable. Reinvent them, make them better and the jobs will bring in applicants. It’s that easy.