Gender Gap Narrows in Hospitality Leadership Roles
Women are growing their presence in leadership roles in the U.S. hospitality industry, both in executive positions as well as in public-speaking engagements.
Women are growing their presence in leadership roles in the U.S. hospitality industry, both in executive positions as well as in public-speaking engagements.
Transformation and reinvention are the buzzwords for business in 2022. On a webinar titled “The Outlook for 2022” hosted by business advisory Deloitte, Richard Houston, Deloitte's CEO for North and South Europe, said technology investment will underpin businesses’ appetite for transformation.
Restaurant and hotel bosses have had a tough year. Some 700,000 hospitality workers threw in the towel on average each month in the past year. Bars, cafés and eateries are 1.3m workers short relative to the 16.9m employed before covid-19. On January 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that a record 4.5m Americans quit their jobs in November, 9% up on a month earlier. The quit rate in leisure and hospitality jumped by a percentage point, to 6.4%. Uncertainty from the Omicron variant may make matters worse: as cases surged in December, restaurant footfall fell sharply, according to OpenTable, an online booking website.
Throughout 2021, employers in the U.S. struggled to hire and retain employees as the economy recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although the full impact of the Omicron variant on the travel industry is not yet known, with borders reopening across the world and recovery settling in, airlines and hospitality brands are again looking ahead with an expansive lens. Crisis always brings with it opportunity — and despite the incredible challenges the sectors faced during the past 20 months, a range of new opportunities are emerging.
Right now, to lure employees, hoteliers are probably offering more pay than they would have pre-pandemic, and definitely more than they're comfortable with. Depending on the position and the requirements of the job, there's a high likelihood they're also offering some concessions in work conditions that aren't aligned with how the hotel or company historically operates.
Hotels are struggling to hire as years of low pay, long hours, and poor benefits catch up with them. Hotel chain CEOs are acknowledging that they need to rethink how they pay workers in order to plug huge gaps in the workforce, according to comments made Monday at a hospitality-industry conference hosted by New York University, reported by industry news site Skift. The US is suffering from a huge labor shortage as workers quit their jobs over wages, benefits, and working conditions – which are all notoriously poor in the hotel industry. The sector has about 300,000 fewer workers than pre-pandemic, preliminary Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data from October shows.
Retaining and hiring employees has been a struggle for the hospitality industry, and since boutique hotels and companies are working on smaller scales than the brands, it requires acute attention to detail.
In anticipation of what’s expected to be a busy holiday shopping season, retailers already strapped for talent have been announcing plans to hire seasonal workers. Meanwhile, Target last month said it would scale back its holiday hiring, not because it’s been immune to the effects of the retail industry’s labor shortage, but because it believes doing so will allow it to better invest in current employees.
If ever a hotel could lay claim to such a brave name - not to mention bold strapline - it would be one designed by Terence Conran, Rocco Yim, William Lim, Vivienne Tam, Barney Cheng and Patrick Blanc. It would also house one of the world's only integrated teaching facilities, with over 2,000 students, and it would be an unrivalled showcase for Hong Kong's culture. From the unequivocal brand statement – Unlike any other – to the sleek identity system and engaging guest items, Richard Hatter’s creative vision is very much in evidence at Hotel ICON. Starting from the ground upwards, Richard spent 24 months helping to strategise, design and build the ICON brand. Since its opening Hotel ICON has enjoyed considerable critical acclaim and business success.
The continuing COVID-19 crisis and an already tight labor pool has made finding the best employees challenging for hotels. For smaller, boutique properties competing against the prestige and allure of larger hotels, it can be more difficult, particularly in mega-resort markets such as Orlando and Las Vegas.
The U.S. hotel industry has been struggling with its labor shortage since before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting drop in and outsized recovery of demand has only exacerbated the problem.
Marriott’s chief executive has warned that the company is in a “fight for talent” as it tries to recruit 10,000 staff to its US hotels to keep pace with a sharp rebound in bookings. Tony Capuano, who took over after the death in February of his predecessor Arne Sorenson, said pandemic redundancies had “rattled” workers’ confidence in the travel and tourism sector, prompting acute staff shortages. “We’ve got to do a consistent job of sharing the narrative that it is in fact an industry segment where incredible careers can be built,” he told the Financial Times. “The ability to tell that story around the globe is more important in the face of this fight for talent than it has ever been.” Marriott, the world’s largest hotel company, has about 10,000 vacancies at its 600 managed hotels across the US. Capuano said the challenge was “particularly acute” in states such as Florida, one of the markets that has bounced back fastest from the pandemic thanks to soaring demand for resort holidays. Covid-19 infections have surged in the state during the peak summer months of July and August. At the end of August Florida’s seven-day rolling average was more than 20,900 new cases per day.
The sector is facing staff shortages, with travel restrictions causing more people to holiday in the UK.
The realities of operating a hotel in a pandemic include dealing with unexpected scenarios, such as spending $10,000 at once on linens because they’re available now and may not be later due to shipping backlogs, or realizing the need to help general managers find purpose in their jobs because the purpose they had pre-pandemic — running their hotel business with success and profitability — disappeared overnight.
The Hôtel Martinez is famous for a strict access policy to protect its famous guests.
As group travel rebounds from a near standstill due to the pandemic, it's expected to look and feel much different than it has in the past. As a result, hotels are hiring group-specific roles to help meeting planners seamlessly customize solutions.
More than half of U.S. hospitality workers wouldn’t go back to their old jobs and over a third aren’t even considering reentering the industry, according to a survey that underscores hiring challenges for restaurants, bars and hotels.
Hoteliers across the U.S. are welcoming the increasing demand this year, but dampening that optimism is the ongoing labor shortage in the industry.
The hotel industry in Asia has long been dominated by male leaders, but that is changing.