After having closed a historic year in terms of sales and occupancy, the major hotel companies are already thinking about the high season with an offensive in terms of hiring in order to meet the huge demand expected from Easter onwards.
For this reason, Meliá Hotels expects to incorporate around 2,500 new workers, of which slightly less than half (1,000) will be permanent employees. To encourage the arrival of personnel, it offers “accommodation and meals in the most critical destinations due to the price of housing”.
In that sense, it will leave aside tourism professionals to focus on hiring promising young people. “We have training programs for more critical groups, such as hotel management or food and beverage, we have gone to universities and job fairs and we have held experiential recruitment days in the most important destinations in Europe to show Meliá’s philosophy.”
At Grupo Barceló, the forecast is “around 1,500 people, in line with last season”, to whom it will also offer accommodation in the most stressed regions. He regrets that the lack of personnel is very worrying, since “some people have decided to look for work in other places, discouraged by the difficulty of finding housing and the increase in the price of housing”.
In the case of Iberostar, it has also launched 1,500 vacancies on the market, of which more than half belong to hotels in the Balearic Islands. Kitchen staff, bar and restaurant staff and housekeepers are the three most in-demand professions. Its objective is “to be more competitive in destinations with greater difficulty in attracting and retaining talent,” according to Cinco Dias.
On its side, Riu does not give hiring estimates, but it does assure that it will match the peak of workers in 2023, which was the company’s highest in Spain with 7,500 people. The hotel company is confident of meeting the targets in the Balearic Islands, but regrets that it will be more difficult in the Canary Islands, where “the lack of professionals in qualified positions is constant”.
Finally, the Palladium Hotels Group foresees the arrival of some 3,200 permanent employees, most of them to the Caribbean. “More than 1.1 million have been invested in actions for these workers, such as investment in structures to house them, common spaces, dining rooms, menu improvements and transportation”.
Source: Arecoa.com
