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From cockpits to guest rooms, the travel and tourism industry confronts a dire need in finding and training qualified job applicants to fill their needs. Training and rewarding workers in even the lowest-paying jobs is vital because they can make or break a brand or a trip.
When a hotel management company was opening a new Homewood Suites near Salt Lake City, Utah, last year, the company posted job ads for housekeepers — and initially didn’t get a single applicant.
The company, The Hotel Group, eventually filled its positions and opened the property by recruiting workers at community colleges and offering bonuses for workers who remained on the job for various periods.
That difficulty in finding workers, particularly for lower-paying jobs such as housekeepers, highlights a growing labor shortage problem in the United States. Citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics findings, the American Hotel & Lodging Association estimated in November 2018 that there were 900,000 unfilled positions in the U.S. hospitality industry, and that was a sharp rise from the employment gap that existed earlier in the year.
That difficulty in filling jobs isn’t just a problem for U.S. hospitality.
“Human capital development,” said Paul Pruangkarn, a spokesman for the Pacific Asia Travel Association, “is one of the industry’s greatest challenges, especially in a region experiencing an incredible rate of growth.” While the Pacific Asia Travel Association sees this as a priority in 2019 and for the foreseeable future, so does the American Hotel & Lodging Association, which offers several programs to develop talent in both low-level and managerial positions.
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