Let’s Talk About Tourism
By Martin Owen | OwenOrganization.com
Tourism and Hospitality are ‘people’ industries. We depend on the interaction between tourists, visitors, customers and the professionals who run the businesses. Where someone who works in an office can often work either from home or remotely, it’s mightily difficult to make a hotel bed or serve a table of diners while sitting at home. Similarly, although it’s technically possible to have either remotely controlled or autonomous airplanes most of us would prefer a couple of human pilots up front to at least monitor systems. The safety and comfort of passengers depends on flight attendants being on the spot, not working from home.
Countries around the world are now dropping their travel restrictions and welcoming both tourists and business travelers. Here on the Northern Gulf Coast, we’ve been open to tourism almost throughout the pandemic. Although our visitor arrivals are down slightly on 2021 (which was an incredible year as people felt a great need to travel after lockdown) we are significantly up on 2019 – the last ‘normal’ year.
The problem for the industry, and this is worldwide issue, is that we are lacking the people who actually make hospitality and tourism work.
At the start of the COVID pandemic, travel and tourism almost completely shut down. In order to survive, transportation businesses, hotels, restaurants and others laid off staff in huge numbers. Many of those suddenly without jobs still needed to have an income so they took other positions in different industries. They started new careers. Others discovered that they would actually prefer not to continue to work in the pressurized environment of hospitality and tourism, so again headed off to pastures new.
With the return of normal conditions, the industry attempted to rehire their recently departed employees. That has been a major problem. Even if someone wants to return to tourism, or if they suddenly feel that they want a new career in hospitality, it takes a great deal of time to recruit and then train those folks. A new housekeeper cannot operate as competently as someone with many years of experience. Servicing a hotel room needs to be done in a certain amount of time and correctly. Without experience, that timescale is considerably extended.
It goes without saying that an airline pilot needs years of both training and experience before they are allowed to fly commercial planes. Flight attendants must go through extensive training before being allowed to provide safety and customer service to their passengers. However, a newly qualified attendant may need many years of experience before they can provide a stellar level of service. Check-in and other customer service personnel need significant training but even then, the experience needed to cope with unusual situations, only comes from long training and mentoring from older and wiser heads.
I’ve been keeping up to date on the situation in hotels world-wide and many of them are struggling to recruit staff. Despite having huge demands to host events and welcome increasing numbers of guests, the ability to recruit permanent staff is proving very difficult. They can try hiring temporary staff or what are known as agency employees, but that is far from an ideal solution.
Travel and tourism are coming back. Business travel is taking longer but still on the rise. The problem we all have is finding and retaining experienced people. That will take much longer.
When you’re next in a restaurant and your meal is taking a while to arrive, think of the possibility that the kitchen may be operating with half the number of chefs they had in the old days. If your server isn’t as polished in their service as previously, think that they may be very new to the job. If your hotel room is not refreshed every day, or room service is taking longer than you’d like, consider that there may be many fewer back of house staff available.
It’s been a hard couple of years for everyone and it’s wonderful that we are returning to normal, but for the hospitality and tourism business that may be a whole ‘new’ normal.