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The tourism workforce shortage is mostly a problem of how the jobs are built, not of how many people exist to fill them. Hotels, restaurants, tour operators and event companies in many markets say they cannot find staff, and they are right about the symptom. What I think they get wrong is the cause. A job that ends every autumn, pays the same in its fifth year as in its first, comes with a few days of training and leads to no visible next step will be hard to fill in any economy, at any wage level, in any decade.
That sounds harsh towards an industry that has been my professional home for years, so here is the fairer version. Nobody sat down and designed tourism work to be unattractive. Seasonality in tourism is real, margins are thin, and demand swings with currencies, weather and headlines (and, as we all learned, with the occasional pandemic). The current shape of the jobs is the sum of many reasonable short-term decisions. But the sum is the problem, and short-term decisions are exactly what the sector itself can change.
The ILO’s overview of the hotels, catering and tourism sector lists the familiar deficits without much decoration: informality, variable and long working hours, low wages, and an insufficient and inadequately skilled workforce. Read together, those are not four separate issues. The last one follows from the first three.
The contract that ends in October
Seasonal contracts are the starting point of almost every staffing conversation on a resort coast. A hotel opens in spring, hires for the summer and lets most of its team go when the last charter flight leaves. The same people may come back next year, or they may not, and the hotel finds out which in April.
I understand why the contract looks this way. A property that is closed or half empty for five months cannot carry a full payroll through the winter. But think about what that contract tells a young person deciding on a profession. It says this is work for part of the year, that the rest of the year is their problem, and that loyalty will not change the arrangement. Plenty of capable people hear that message and choose something duller and steadier.
The businesses that keep their people usually do something about the gap rather than accepting it as fate. Hotel groups move a core team between a summer property and a city or winter property. Neighbouring businesses that peak in different months agree to share staff, so a person works the beach season in one and the congress season in another. Some properties keep a smaller year-round team busy with maintenance, training and the shoulder months that sustainable tourism is supposed to widen anyway. Each of these costs money and none removes seasonality, but each one turns a contract that ends into a job that continues.
A pay slip that stays the same in year five
Talk to people with several seasons behind them about what bothered them most, and pay usually comes up, though not always in the way managers expect. The starting wage in tourism is often comparable to other entry-level service work. The trouble starts later. In many hotels and restaurants the pay of a waiter, a receptionist or an animation team member in their fifth season is close to what a newcomer earns, with tips or service charges doing most of the work of rewarding experience.
That flat line sends a precise message: your experience is worth very little to us. People respond to it rationally. They leave just when they have become good, often for sectors that value the very skills tourism taught them, from retail management to customer service to sales. I can imagine an owner reading this and objecting that guests will not pay more for a room because the receptionist has been there five years. Perhaps not directly. But they pay, one way or another, for the mistakes of a front desk that is permanently in its first month.
A pay structure that rewards returning seasons, languages, certificates and responsibility does not have to be generous to work. It has to be visible, written down and kept.
The staff canteen and the shared room
The parts of a tourism job that guests never see often decide whether someone stays. Staff housing, the food in the staff canteen, the shuttle that does or does not run after a late shift, the split shift that leaves four unpaid hours in the middle of the day: these are small lines for the employer and large facts for the employee.
The shortage is the predictable result of jobs designed to last one season, pay one rate for years and lead nowhere in particular.
The same pattern shows up wherever people are hard to find. When housing near a resort coast becomes expensive, a seasonal job stops being possible for anyone who does not already live nearby. When the shift pattern makes study or a second income impossible, the people who most need flexibility are pushed out first. When the staff room is a corridor with a bench, everyone understands where they rank. An operator who says people simply don’t want to work any more, while offering a bunk in a room shared by four, should look at the room before looking at the people.
The first week on the floor
Training in much of tourism means shadowing someone for a few days and then working alone. For some roles that is enough. For many it is not, and the cost is paid twice: by the newcomer, who learns the job by making mistakes in front of guests, and by the colleague who has to absorb those mistakes while doing their own work.
Good induction is not complicated. It means a written description of the role, a few days in which the new person is not counted in the roster, a named person to ask, and a short check after the first week and again after the first month. Large hotel chains often have this on paper. Smaller properties, agencies and event companies, which together employ a great many people, often do not, and so the first week quietly decides whether someone comes back next season.
Training has a quieter side too. Tourism businesses complain about the skills that tourism education gives graduates, yet they rarely send their own experienced people into classrooms, offer paid and mentored internships, or train the people already on their payroll for the next job up. Skills do not appear in a workforce by themselves. Somebody has to build them, and in a sector made mostly of small and medium businesses, the ones that refuse to build them will keep complaining that nobody did.
A ladder with missing rungs
Career ladders exist in tourism and along the event management career path, but they are often invisible from the bottom. A large hotel has a clear structure on its organization chart: commis to chef de partie, receptionist to front office manager, coordinator to sales manager. What it rarely has is a written path that tells a newcomer what they need to learn, roughly how long it takes to move up, and who will help them get there.
In smaller businesses the ladder may simply stop. The owner is the manager, the family runs the key departments, and a talented employee reaches the ceiling within two or three seasons. Nobody is to blame for that. It is a structural fact, and the honest response is to say so and to help that person move on well, perhaps to a partner business or a larger operator, rather than pretending there is a future that does not exist.
Recreation management is what resort animation teams do all day, and they show how short the ladder can be. Those teams are full of energetic young people who learn program design, group leadership and guest psychology in real conditions. Very few of them see a route from the pool deck to a year-round management job, so the sector loses them at exactly the moment they could start running things.
The event crew list rebuilt every spring
Events have their own version of the shortage. Most of the people who build, staff and run an event work project by project, and the industry depends on temporary teams gathered for a few days and dispersed again. Technical crews, riggers, stage managers and experienced registration staff are the hardest to find, and when the pandemic stopped events for a long period, many of them moved into other work and never came back.
What makes the event version worse is that so few organizers keep any memory of their crews. The list of who worked well lives in someone’s phone. Payments arrive late. Insurance for a day worker is unclear. Every season begins with a round of calls to see who is still around. Staffing sits near the top of almost every honest list of event industry trends, yet the habits that would ease it, paying on time, calling back the same people, offering a few guaranteed days a month to the best freelancers, are among the cheapest changes an organizer can make.
The connection to event tourism is direct. A city that wants to host more congresses, festivals and sports events needs a stable pool of skilled people who know its venues and its routines. Venues and hotels can be built in a few years. That pool takes longer, and it is built by employers, one fair contract at a time.
The roster that stays full in March
Destinations talk a great deal about extending the season, and rightly so. Tourism trends keep pointing to longer travel periods and a growing interest in the months on either side of summer. But a longer season needs people who are still there in March, and they will only be there if the job gave them a reason to stay through the winter. Seen this way, the workforce question belongs inside destination development rather than in a separate human resources folder that each business opens alone.
The employers I see doing well on staffing are rarely the most generous ones. They are the ones that made their jobs legible: a contract that says what happens after the season, a pay scale that moves, a first week that is planned, a next step that has a name. Associations, hotel groups and clusters of local businesses can build those things together far more easily than any single hotel or agency, and the ones that have set up shared training, shared staff pools or common standards for seasonal contracts tend to find that the shortage looks a lot less like fate.
Which of your best people from last season have you already called back for next year?