Skift Take
February was a surprisingly strong month for hotel task gains. Companies require to continue the momentum leading into the hectic summertime travel season, which is just a couple of months away.
Cameron Sperance
A better-than-expected tasks report saw the hospitality sector adding workers ahead of what many anticipate to be a record-setting travel season later this year.
U.S. hotels added 23,000 tasks last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The number is a robust showing for the market especially due to the sticking around effect from the Omicron surge of brand-new coronavirus cases over the winter. The lodging sector’s joblessness rate ticked down to 7 percent last month.
That is higher than the 3.8 percent national average but considerably more in line with the more comprehensive figure after posting a much higher space for the majority of the pandemic. The overall leisure and hospitality sector was a major contributor to the 678,000 tasks added to the U.S. economy last month. Leisure and hospitality represented 179,000 tasks included, but work in the sector is still down approximately 9 percent from pre-pandemic levels.
“The tasks report is clearly excellent news,” LW Hospitality Advisors CEO Daniel Lesser said. “However you can spin it another method also because all this does is verify that the economy is quite hot and is continuing to put further upward pressure on inflation.”
Hotel companies and their leadership groups finally recognized in recent months the market’s labor lack crisis was one not caused by pandemic stimulus plans. Instead, they came to terms that the market had a credibility issue as a place that was quick to furlough employees in the face of a crisis which paid employees less than other sectors like retail.
While labor lacks existed prior to the pandemic, the plunge in hotel need starting in March 2020 just intensified the issue.
< img width="600"height ="371" src="https://skift.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/U.S.-Hotel-Workers-Feb-22.jpg"alt =""/ > Marriott dropped from roughly 174,000 employees at the end of 2019 to about 120,000 at the end of last year, according to the business’s most recent yearly 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Hilton’s headcount went from 173,000 staff members at the end of 2019 to 142,000 at the end of last year across the company’s owned, managed, and rented hotels as well as its corporate offices.
“As lodging need recovers from the lows seen in the early months of the pandemic, we have seen and continue to see industry-wide labor shortages causing obstacles in working with or re-hiring for specific positions, primarily in specific high-demand U.S. markets,” the Marriott filing specified.
Hotel executives showed increasing wages and much better marketing the status seeking opportunities within the industry were vital to wooing back workers in the competitive recruiting landscape– specifically as companies from other industries like Amazon were poaching employees with transferrable abilities. The February jobs report indicates those efforts are starting to settle.
Hotel owners have actually had the ability to absorb wage increases, as the current inflationary environment in the broader economy sent out hotel rates skyrocketing. The greater daily rates make higher employee wages possible, and it’s unlikely rates will decrease amidst the higher demand anticipated this spring and summer.
“If you consider it, there really is no ceiling on the ability to raise space rates,” Lesser said. “It’s all about supply and need, and there is a lot bottled-up need to go travel.