BALTIMORE — In the hotel industry, the labor equation essentially is more guests require more staff.
Rebounding from an historic demand crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, hotels first scrambled to fill open positions as leisure travelers returned, particularly in resort locations.
"At a high, at one point in time last year," Marriott International had 10,000 open positions in the Americas, according to Karl Fischer, chief human resources officer for the region. "We worked that down by the end of the year to about 6,800. So it did improve over the course of last year."
But now, another surge in openings and hiring is being driven by group business in some of the big cities. "I'm back up to 9,200 openings as I sit here today," Fischer said during a panel discussion last week at the Asian American Hotel Owners Association's annual trade show and convention.
Fischer said the company is "always looking for housekeepers" because "if you can't clean a room, you can't sell it," but now a lot of the job openings are in the banquet and events department.
"We're not out of the woods yet" with labor challenges, he added.
Steve Woodward, vice president of quality, training and development at Red Roof, said housekeeping and laundry represent the biggest labor challenges for his company's hotels.
"We're pulling laundry attendants to go strip rooms, and then we're seeing inventory not being fully taken care of a lot of times. We see a lot of our owners cleaning rooms or working the front desks. The smaller hotels will have a couple — one cleaning the room while the other works the front desk," he said.
Sanjay Bedi, vice president of operations at Real Hospitality Group, said reduced housekeeping isn't a solution that sits well with many guests.
"The first groups that came back to our hotels were international ... and they were unforgiving. They wanted the full experience — all the amenities and the services to come with it," he said.
As guests become more inflexible with their expectations, hotel managers and their employees will have to be more flexible, the panelists said.
For example, hotel managers are being forced to rethink staff scheduling, to meet both employee and guest demands.
Fischer said a job posting for housekeepers that advertises "make your own schedule" attracts double the number of applicants.
"Of course, now we have to execute on that, and teach managers to stop thinking in terms of eight-hour shifts," he said. "If employees want to work just the weekend, or four hours one day and nine hours the next four days, we have to teach ourselves to work in that world. Flexibility used to be the icing on the cake; now people expect it."
Bedi said training for managers is key to that type of scheduling to ensure that the hotel operations are adequately covered, and added that someone should create an app for dynamic scheduling.
"Our industry has worked on three shifts a day forever; everything was in our lap," he said.
Technology can help to ease the burden on staff while improving the guest experience, panelists said.
"We're seeing a lot of new tech come to bear. You don't have to go to the front desk to check in or get a key; it's on your phone," Fischer said, adding features like mobile check-in don't necessarily mean less personalized guest attention.
"The short answer is we think you're going to see fewer jobs in hotels, but higher-paying jobs and broader jobs," he said. "Imagine the front of the house where there's a concierge, a front-desk clerk, you've got someone taking calls and running guests up to rooms. Suppose that was all one job — and we've already started this. It's just a 'guest experience leader,' and the people who have that job do all of that. That's part of the reason they need to be paid more, but there's fewer of them."
Cross-training solutions such as this also help reduce overtime when staff call off work, he said, and "people like those jobs better; they're more interesting, more engaging and require more training."
In this new model, the front-desk clerk might be a face on a screen, and the housekeepers might become the main point of contact for guests, Woodward said.
Bedi agreed "some jobs are going to get a lot more sophisticated than they are now."
Training employees for those more sophisticated jobs also "shows them a future" with career opportunities, Woodward said.