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.

Making the Right Pitch

Hoteliers need to look to what companies and industries drew hotel employees away, Bojanowski said. The industry needs to look at what skills these other industries found transferable in hotel employees to make them attractive and eligible, he said.

Some of what they offered was more pay, and some of what they offered was flexibility, both of which are things the industry should address, Bojanowski said.

Hotels don’t necessarily need to have rooms cleaned or have someone work the front desk from 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. each day, he said. Women bore an unfair burden associated with childcare and schooling, he said, asking why someone couldn’t come in to clean rooms between 4 and 8 p.m.

“Why not? We have a lot of people who check in after 8 o’clock at night. It’s really OK,” he said.

There are a lot of industries hoteliers are competing against, Brunt said. In Atlanta, there are Amazon jobs and industrial positions available where employees can move from $15 to $18 to $22 an hour in a six-month period by just showing up and proving they’re a reliable worker.

Those jobs are different from what a person does in the hospitality setting, Brunt said. The money is not always going to be what keeps somebody working in a warehouse, and there are people geared toward hospitality, but it’s the hospitality environment is not hospitable now.

“It’s hard to get excited about servicing no one or servicing a different customer base than you were expecting,” he said.

Marcus Hotels & Resorts Senior Vice President of Development Andrea Foster said that in the early years of her career working at a front desk, all she wanted to do was to figure out how to solve someone’s problem and make their day.

“That’s not going to happen by being like, ‘Oh, I packaged all these Amazon boxes,’” she said. “That’s not the same. I think we’re going to get back there, but we do have to find a better way to market our industry to people. I don’t think we’re doing a good job.”

The AHLA campaign to fill open jobs in the industry is a new endeavor, Foster said. It’s important because it shows how someone can start out on a lower rung, even without a degree, and work up the ladder and create a career, she said.

“We have to talk about that more,” she said.

By Bryan Wroten