Staffing shortages leaving Sask. hotel industry 'in a quandary'

SASKATOON -

Saskatchewan's hospitality industry has been one of the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the province’s Hotel & Hospitality Association says the effects will be felt for years.

“There's two aspects of our industry that we look at for marketing purposes; one is the leisure component, and then the other one is the corporate component,” said Jim Bence, Saskatchewan Hotel & Hospitality Association president & CEO.

When the pandemic began, the industry took a massive hit.

“Mass cancellations across the board,” said Alt Hotel general manager Corrine Lund.

“It was sweeping, where everything from conferences to meetings to individual guests—it was suddenly just decimated in one fell swoop.”

“For the downtown pieces we've got 250 rooms, 30,000 square feet of banquet space, restaurants, lounges, the whole nine yards,” said Bence.

“They're really dependent, in many cases, on that corporate travel. They need the conferences and the trade shows and all those other pieces. So they laid off, in many cases, 90 per cent of their staff when this all began.”

“It was pretty scary,” said Lund.

LACK OF HOTEL STAFF

After that, they say supervisors and managers with transferable skill sets left for other industries.

“The staff had either gone on to find other work, because they had been waiting patiently, waiting a very long time to come back, that didn't happen,” said Lund “Some of them, they just weren't comfortable coming back to this industry.”

“What we were left with was general managers and maybe a few in the executive team, that were really left running the shows,” he said.

“They were cleaning rooms, they were doing night audit shifts, they were painting lines in parking lots. They're really doing the the lion's share of the work of a full service hotel.”

Now, Bence says, as many as 40 per cent of that group is contemplating retirement, which will provide the industry with more challenges.

“Many of the general managers are a certain age group,” said Lund.

“I've heard from many that is like ‘Okay, I've had two years of this and maybe it's time to retire because I'm just, I'm mentally exhausted.’”

“It's difficult to succession plan when all of your department heads, or your supervisors have moved on,” Bence adds.

“We're really left in a quandary now as to what we're going to do in these next 12 to 16 months, 18 months, on who is going to fill these positions if they're vacated.”

FUTURE OF HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY

The task for the industry now is bringing more people into work.

“If I'm a young person looking to increase my training, this will be the industry that I will be jumping into,” said Josh Davidson, program head of recreation and tourism management at Saskatchewan Polytechnic.

“Just given the number of people leaving the industry because of the pandemic, then the other side of it, just the aging out workforce—there's a lot of opportunity there for people to become employed and in a pretty positive and enjoyable career.”

Davidson says enrollment in the program is at 100 per cent this year, and already at 80 per cent capacity for next year, and many students will receive job offers before completing the two-year program.

“Many of them go into the practicums and practicum hosts see the skills and abilities of the students have and they usually give them a job offer,” he said. “If they don't, there's literally a queue lined up for people to hire our graduates.”

Lund says she’ll be doing what she can to keep the industry hospitable until more people can enter the workforce.

“We still want to hang on to the fact that we do offer service, it is the hospitality industry,” she said. “I think the good hotels, they’ll know when to pull back and go ‘no, we're not going to rent you that room unless we know you are going to get a great experience’. So if that means I have to shut down three or four floors to make sure that the other 10 floors are well serviced, then that's what we're going to do.”

“I hope that's not the long term effect that we're looking at, but you know, you roll with the punches and you do what you got to do.”