More than 80% of hoteliers across the nation are reporting staffing shortages, and Hawaii is no exception with this year’s projection for state hotel jobs expected to be nearly 12% below pre-pandemic levels.
As many as 82% of hoteliers are experiencing staffing shortages and 26% are reporting such severe shortages that their ability to operate their hotels is affected, according to a new survey of hoteliers released by the American Hotel &Lodging Association this month. As many as 40% of hoteliers indicated that filling housekeeping jobs was their most critical need.
The staffing shortages were detailed in AHLA’s Front Desk Feedback survey of 474 hoteliers, which was conducted May 3-9. The numbers are up slightly from January when 79% of respondents said they were experiencing staffing shortages. But they have gotten better since earlier in the pandemic recovery when 97% of hoteliers surveyed in May 2022 said they were experiencing staffing shortages and 49% were experiencing severe shortages.
An Oxford Economics analysis prepared for AHLA in February projected that this year there will be 39,104 direct hotel jobs in Hawaii and 126,146 hotel-supported jobs, down 11.7% from 2019’s 44,273 direct-hotel jobs and 142,821 hotel-supported jobs. That’s slightly higher than the nationwide drop, which is projected this year to fall 11.1% from 2019.
Hawaii’s projected hotel job decline is tied for 20th worst along with Arizona and Minnesota.
Keith Vieira, principal of KV &Associates, Hospitality Consulting, said some of the Hawaii job declines are tied to hard-to-fill vacancies, while others are due to lags in the pandemic recovery, especially from visitors from Japan, who tend to dine in more at hotels.
“Since the pandemic, not everybody is back to the same operating hours or even days,” Vieira said. “People also had to make adjustments during COVID, and coming out of COVID it was hard to go back to full staffing — that’s more reflective in the restaurants, where some are going dark one or two days a week.”
He added that during the pandemic hotels also lost more workers to retirement.
Hawaii hoteliers also say that the shortage reflects the lingering effects of the “Great Resignation,” where coming out of the pandemic workers across the nation and across career fields voluntarily resigned en masse — sometimes quitting work entirely, other times exploring new opportunities, or pursuing greater work-life balance through jobs that were less customer facing, required fewer hours, or offered remote options.
Jerry Gibson, president of the Hawaii Hotel Alliance, said that Hawaii hotels are still short-staffed, particularly in the housekeeping and food and beverage departments.
“We are working very hard in recruiting for those two hot spots,” Gibson said. “We are getting close to being able to open most of the way with hotel food and beverage outlets. But a lot of independent restaurants, for instance, would like to open another day and they can’t because they don’t have enough people.”
In Hawaii, more than 1,600 hotel jobs were open Tuesday with 459 of them on Oahu, according to a search on the employment website indeed.com.
An AHLA spokesperson said, “Filling these positions is critical to the economic health of Honolulu and Hawaii. Last year alone, hotel guests spent more than $23 billion in destinations across the state, and Hawaii hotels generated nearly $2.1 billion in tax revenue.”