While the majority of restrictions put in place to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom were lifted on July 19, the government and National Health Service’s track-and-trace system continues to raise concerns with hotel staffing in the country.

The track-and-trace system alerts those who have been in contact with someone testing positive for coronavirus and requests they self-isolate for 10 days, but isolation is still voluntary.

Critics of the system claim alerts often get sent to people who have not been put at risk, and each alert places more pressure on day-to-day operations. Some have proposed a test-and-release system that would allow those alerted to quickly show they are free of symptoms and thus not have to self-isolate.

Hoteliers said reopening their properties in an environment of subdued demand is enough pressure, and the threat of not having sufficient staff is adding to that.

The U.K.'s Office for National Statistics on July 19 released a report stating “in the period April to June 2021 there were an estimated 102,000 job vacancies in hospitality, nearly five and a half times higher than the 19,000 recorded in December to February 2021, and higher than pre-pandemic levels."

“This increase may indicate the beginning of a temporarily tight [labor] market or bottleneck, where hospitality businesses are looking to increase employment but currently cannot recruit the numbers necessary,” the report continued.

Kate Nicholls, CEO of hotel and hospitality membership organization UKHospitality, said “it has always been our understanding from discussions with government that the NHS COVID-19 app was advisory and has no legal basis."

“The industry is facing significant staffing challenges just as restrictions ease after 16 months, with up to as many as a fifth of staff in the sector isolating at any one time,” she said.

Nicholls added UKHospitality hopes the government moves quickly to instigating a test-and-release to “prevent the summer being canceled and vast swathes of the population unnecessarily confined to their homes.”

Grays Court in York was one hotel that was forced to temporarily close following an alert to its staff.

Sarah Czarnecki, a director at the hotel and deputy chair of the Hospitality Association York, said fortunately the crisis was short-lived.

“We had significant loss of turnover. Of our core team of 25, five front-of-house staff and one housekeeper were pinged over two days. We decided to be upfront about it, but some guests did worry we have COVID and canceled, so we were forced to close our restaurant," she said.

“We did not have COVID, though. This is happening not just in hospitality, but we see many hotels do not really want to talk about it,” she said.

Czarnecki said the hotel’s restaurant is traditionally closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, so the pain was limited. The restaurant has since reopened.

Greene King — the Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk-based brewer that operates pubs, restaurants and more than 100 hotels — said it was forced to close 33 pubs due to the track-and-trace scheme, although many have since reopened.

Independent hotels and smaller hotel chains face a potentially larger problem than larger hotels and chains, which are more likely to have sufficient staff to draw on in an emergency.

Harry Douglass, associate director at business advisory HVS, said it is something else that the hotel and hospitality industries will get through.

The industry “has demonstrated extraordinary resilience, flexibility and robustness in response to changing conditions, and that is likely to continue, but nonetheless this is a worry as it might extend the recovery process,” he said.

“If [a restaurant, for example, has] to close for five to 10 days, then you have to reconfigure your existing offer, and that is very difficult, a lot of hard work, especially when staffing levels are way down,” he added.

Steven Alton, CEO of pubs organization the British Institute of Innkeeping, said recent research revealed 46% of members could not recruit enough staff to meet requirements and 39% stated self-isolation had severely impacted their teams.

“The results of our survey clearly show the huge impact that self-isolation is having … just as legal restrictions have been removed and their recovery could have started. We have shared this insight directly with government and continue to push for a pragmatic solution to self-isolation," he said.

Alton said government guidance on track-and-trace is unclear and “alerts to self-isolate remain advisory … although that is not reflected in other government guidance.”

“This needs rapid attention before the hospitality-led recovery grinds to a halt,” he added.

Grays Court’s Czarnecki said she and other executives at the hotel have lobbied their own Member of Parliament to help tackle the issue.

“The track-and-trace system was advisory, then it was said to be mandatory. It definitely is nuanced and confusing, and no responsible business is going to say, oh well, if you get a ping, just ignore it,” she said.

She added in the last few weeks there has been more appreciation of the confusion around the system and the pressures it is adding to businesses.