Hotels can’t find staff for the best summer in their history

The recovery of tourism has been balsamic for the hotel industry after two years without income due to the pandemic. Many companies have recovered pre-crisis billing and some have even returned to presenting black numbers in their income statements. The latest barometer from the real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield stressed that the hotel industry (the study analyzes data from 1,200 establishments) had exceeded the income and prices charged before the crisis. Specific, revenue per available room, the industry’s main profitability indicator, grew 84% annually to 90.1 euros, 1.5 euros above 2019. The average rate was 133 euros, which was 12% more than before the crisis. In this scenario, the industry is preparing to reduce debt and resume investment plans paralyzed by the pandemic.

The only black point among so much optimism is the difficulty in finding staff. Something that already happened last year and that forced companies like Meliá to encourage hiring by accompanying it with accommodation and full board in critical destinations to fill vacancies such as Ibiza, Menorca, Calviá or Benidorm.

Flight of talent

In a recent interview with Cinco Días, Meliá’s CEO, Gabriel Escarrer, acknowledged his concern about the lack of attractiveness of the sector in the labor market and he was hopeful that the latest salary increases agreed in the agreement help to solve this problem. “The latest agreements signed in the Canary Islands, with an increase of 10% in three years, or in the Balearic Islands, with an increase of 8% in two years, seem reasonable to me. I don’t see any problem in that sense, ”he stressed.

In the first month of last high season, 13,432 positions were left unfilled

In his last public appearance during the latest edition of Fitur, the CEO of Palladium, Jesús Sobrino, also made self-criticism. “We are causing a brain drain with this war between companies taking away our templates. That is why we are doing our homework to be an attractive company”. The main destination of this talent drain is the hotel industry, in which the wages in agreement are higher, and also the exit from the labor market, in line with what happened with the Great Resignation. In the first month of the last high season, 13,432 jobs remained unfilled in the different hotel and tourism activities, of which 3,817 were waiters, 2,370 were delivery men or drivers, 2,139 were cooks, 2,059 were kitchen helpers and 1,529 floor waiters, according to the report prepared by Infojobs.

Waiters, cooks and floor waiters are the least in demand

On those dates, Barceló, the second largest hotel chain, opted to redistribute the teams and promote digitization to free up staff and assign them where they were most needed. Raúl González, CEO of the Barceló hotel division, stresses that the key for next summer is to increase remuneration and value the professional career. “If we get people to identify tourism as beautiful work that can be done with passion, we will find people. If what we achieve is that people consider it as a job of lesser category, we have a problem, ”she stressed.

RIU and the FP

Other hotel companies, such as RIU on the Balearic Islands, have chosen to train their own staff. In fact, it has become the first to have obtained authorization from the Balearic Islands Occupation Service (SOIB) to give regulated training and issue professional certificates. The pilot experience began in November at the facilities of the RIU Playa Park hotel in Mallorca, which closes its doors until April, and is being carried out in two phases. The first is a bar and dining course for 15 people that takes place from November to March and the second takes place in the kitchen and will last from January to June. “We started our experience with vocational training with information technology, where we also detected a shortage of workers. We have already released four promotions with 10 students each. Now we have opted for professionalism certificates in hotels because they are the beginning of an educational itinerary that allows you to continue studying and even go to university”, he stresses. Pere Torrens, director of training at RIU.

The training roadmap is different in the two branches. “In the bar and dining room they train for four hours a day and at the end of the course we will hire a minimum of 60%, while in the kitchen is dual training. This means that from the start of your training, you get paid through an apprenticeship contract and it is in this period that the values ​​of the family business are instilled in the worker, such as good customer service, honesty or humility, to retain talent. ”.

Wage increases in the Balearic Islands as a hook to attract workers

Baleares. Two weeks ago, the hotel federations of Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera agreed to a pre-agreement with the UGT to extend the collective agreement for the hotel industry in the Balearic Islands for another two years, which will mean an increase in wages of 5% this year and 3.3 % in 2024 for 150,000 workers.

Rent. This increase is part of the companies’ strategy to attract employment to the archipelago. In a sector with below-average salaries, another obstacle to finding workers is the high rental price, which has skyrocketed, according to hoteliers, due to the proliferation of tourist apartments.

Moratorium. Palma de Mallorca is an example of this trend of radically increasing rental prices. Since 2012, only single-family or semi-detached houses can be rented, prohibiting apartments in neighboring communities. The regulation, however, allows apartments to be rented through the Urban Leasing Law (LAU), thus leaving in limbo, for example, apartments that were traditionally rented by the week. The regional registry indicates that since 2015 the aforementioned vacation rental places have gone from 37,730 to 103,339 in seven years, which means that they have practically tripled.