In a hot travel summer, hotels take on staffing shortages with new tech and better career paths

With hotel occupant levels returning to prepandemic levels, hotel owners have one top worry: staffing. The hospitality industry estimates that in the United States 1.5 million jobs will still be open by the end of 2022—jobs that had been filled before the start of the pandemic.

To address the staffing crunch, the industry is looking to two main strategies: promoting hospitality as a good place for lifelong careers with many growth paths and automating routine tasks to make every job more meaningful and interesting.

In a two-year period, US hotels lost a collective $111.8 billion in room revenue alone, wiping out a decade’s worth of revenue and job growth, according to research from the American Hotel & Lodging Association. US hotels had their best recruiting month ever in May, adding 84,000 employees, but even at that rate it would take two years to get back to where the industry staffing level was prior to the pandemic, says Oracle Hospitality SVP and General Manager Alex Alt.

“Travel has come back with a vengeance—this summer is likely to exceed occupancy levels of 2019,” says Alt. “We’re looking at full hotels and less staff.” The urgent quests for hospitality leaders are around creating a memorable guest experience and getting employees back into the hotel, ready to serve people who have been stuck at home for two years.

Hospitality as a lifetime career

A top priority is positioning the hospitality industry as a great place for a lifelong career with multiple career paths. Oracle is working with the American Hotel & Lodging Association on initiatives to attract people to the hospitality industry by raising awareness of the myriad opportunities in the industry.

Those growth opportunities include tech-related careers. “Sixty percent of my 2,500 employees started their career in hospitality working on the front lines at a property,” Oracle’s Alt says. "Now they're working for a software company.” Others who start at the front desk move up through management or into the back office, while working for small independents or major brands.

At the same time, industry leaders realize that the landscape may have changed permanently, both in terms of guest expectations and labor. “There's going to be increasing reliance on technology to offset the human capital side of hospitality, since staffing’s likely not going to return to prepandemic levels,” says Alt. Sixty-five percent of hotel executives say investing in new technologies for staff is a key part of their strategy to withstand labor shortages and attract talent, finds a survey conducted by Oracle Hospitality and travel news outlet Skift, encompassing 5,266 consumers and 633 hospitality executives globally.

Here are three priorities for hospitality professionals—and according to Alt, there is no close number four.

1. Automating routine tasks so staff can focus on guest experience

Fifty-four percent of survey respondents say that automating the front desk experience is a top priority. But that doesn’t mean dehumanizing the experience. “Mobility and automation are huge enablers of productivity and efficiency,” Alt says. “It untethers hotel associates from the front desk and allows them to be around the property doing multiple tasks.” The key priority is to reduce the need for staff to perform repeatable, low-value tasks and instead let staff interact with guests in more memorable ways. “How often have you said, ‘The best part of my trip was that time I spent checking in and swiping my credit card for incidentals?’” says Alt.

2. Driving incremental revenue that also improves a guest’s stay

Hotels are investing in technology that allows them to make meaningful, relevant offers to guests at every stage of the relationship, from prebooking and throughout the stay—49% of survey respondents strongly agree that special amenities and upgrades are critical to their revenue strategy. There’s been a 10-year boom in hotel construction, so hotel companies had been able to increase revenue by simply adding new rooms. Now, with the COVID-19-related slowdown in construction, hotels are looking elsewhere for revenue growth. “The best way to figure out if a traveler values something is to see if they're willing to pay for it,” says Alt. That’s where products, such as Oracle’s Nor1, come in. “We can offer a traveler almost anything,” he says. “We can offer them a room upgrade, early check-in, late check-out, a room with a view, a room away from the elevator.” By doing this, the hotel gains real data about what travelers value.

3. Increasing personalization to drive guest satisfaction

More than 50% of guests want to see offers and advertisements that are personalized, and almost 50% want more personalized service before and during their trip. That explains why all major hotel brands are investing in loyalty and personalization technology.

Hotels are awash with data about their customers, but they’re starting to invest in technologies that can better uncover guest preferences, letting a company use data to make appealing offers. “Hotels are getting better at standardizing how they define that information and then engaging with the property management system to pull information about the guest that says, ‘She prefers to stay on high floors. She has been willing to upgrade to a suite. She likes to visit the spa,’" Alt says. Sometimes these offers are designed to increase revenue, but often they’re aimed at adding something positive to the guest experience, making the guest feel recognized and welcome.

Alt expects summer 2022 to be a record summer for travel, but hoteliers he speaks with are also optimistic about the fall, as they foresee business and conference travel rocketing up.

However, hospitality leaders he speaks with also have joked that guests gave them a hall pass over the past year, and now the hall pass is gone. “The consumer is now far less patient with bad service or interruptions to their experience,” Alt says. “It's high stakes. There's no doubt that the industry and the folks that serve on the front lines are going to have a busy summer.”

Dig deeper

• Oracle Hospitality/SKIFT report
• Video: OPERA Cloud Property Management: Ushering in a New Era of Innovation
• Oracle Hospitality customer successes
• Explore Oracle Hospitality products

Photography: Andersen Ross for Getty Images