Excerpt from CoStar

Early Pandemic Layoffs Damaged Industry's Career Image

During a meeting of the Lodging Industry Investment Council, members spoke about the ongoing labor shortage and how employees and potential hires may not view the industry as reliable enough for a career.

While U.S. hotel demand has been on a recovery path for most of the year, hoteliers continue to struggle with having too many open jobs to properly service that demand.

During a meeting of the Lodging Industry Investment Council ahead of the recent NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference, hotel executives shared their observations, revelations and experiences in figuring out how to attract and hold on to talented staff members.

Done With Hotels

Everybody is burned out, said Steve Van, president and CEO of Prism Hotels & Resorts. It’s difficult recruiting new employees and giving the impression the job is fun and cheery.

“If you’re really honest with people, the glamour’s off the marquee out there,” he said.

Pay is one issue, and while an operator can pay employees $15,000 more per year, the hotel owners are eventually going to start asking about their net operating income, he said.

The challenge of filling open roles isn’t limited to just housekeepers, Van said. It’s a matter of finding front-desk associates, sales team members or anyone who needs to have a “get up and go” personality.

“A lot of them have said, ‘I’ve had it with the industry,’” he said. “They’re not saying we don’t want Prism. We just don’t want the industry.”

Even if an employer pays staff $15,000 more, that solves their hiring problem temporarily, said Lodging Advisors CEO Sean Hennessey.

“If the underlying conditions aren’t better, it’s going to come crashing down at some point,” he said.

Broken Trust

PM Hotel Group President and CEO Joseph Bojanowski said the hotel industry knows where employees went, at least at first.

“It’s where we sent them, which was home,” he said.

For a midlevel manager who has been in the industry for 10 years, there’s a high likelihood that person was laid off or experienced something similar during the Great Recession, he said. Both that down cycle and this pandemic-caused one amplified the cyclical nature of the hotel business.

Employees would hear their companies love them and that they are all about loyalty, but then they were sent home, Bojanowski said. At the same time, companies like Amazon or the life sciences and tech industries step in with open positions.

The hotel industry is known as a place where someone can start out a housekeeper and work up to running a company, and it’s less likely someone cleaning a hospital room will end up running a health care system, Bojanowski said.

“I don’t think that those opportunities present themselves there, but it’s going to mean calling them back and, unfortunately, we are in a position where we sent them away,” he said.

It’s a credibility issue, said Benjamin Brunt, principal and chief investment officer at Noble Investment Group.

“For them, it's are we a reliable industry to take a career chance on?” he said.

Click here to read complete article at CoStar.