Solving Labor Shortage Through Technology
14 experts shared their view
With travel demand accelerating rapidly, the hospitality industry is experiencing a new challenge: labor shortages resulting in sharply rising labor cost, which consumes as much as 60%-80% of RevPAR (CBRE). In the U.S. alone, hotels need to hire 600,000 more employees by summer to be able to meet demand (BIS.gov). Right now there are 171,800 open positions on LinkedIn for hospitality jobs in the U.S.
Wages in hospitality operations - frontline position such as housekeeping, front desk, wait staff, line cooks, etc. - are up more than 20% since April 2020 (Hotel Effectiveness). Hotels and restaurants alike are offering sign-up bonuses, higher wages and even cash payments to candidates just to come for an interview. In the same time productivity is down due to influx of inexperienced staff, since many of the experienced hospitality professionals left the industry due to furloughs and layoffs during the pandemic.
The question is, how can the hospitality industry solve the current labor shortages and unsustainable labor cost through technology innovations, automation, mobility, robotization and next gen technology applications?
It's no mystery what my feelings are toward technology. I've been a technophile for most of my adult life, and I have a book on post-human hospitality coming out next year. You can go as far as calling me a transhumanist, too. That being said, I am a strong believer in the cooperation between humans and machines, rather than machines replacing humans tout-court, at least in the near future. Of course, even due to COVID, we've witnessed an acceleration in self-service technologies in hotels, such as self-check-in/out apps, keyless technology, check-in/out kiosks, etc. The guest is becoming more and more a "prosumer," terms created by futurist Alvin Toffler that refers to an individual who is both consumer and producer. However, this level of automation is far from being mainstream, and the industry will likely suffer from human labor shortage in the short term. What hotels can do is starting embracing technology that can take care of the "logistic" part of travel and, by doing so, relying less on humans for things such as check-ins, check-outs, invoicing, etc. What we don't know, though, is if guests are ready to be served by machines yet, because all the studies on the topic are highly speculative, and the (very few, to be honest) examples of properties run mainly by machines are not particularly reassuring.