Niagara Falls hotels experiencing ‘substantial’ staffing shortage
Industry tries to catch up to Ontario being in Step 3 of COVID-19 reopening
With Ontario now in Step 3 of its COVID-19 reopening plan, loosening many of the restrictions the province has endured for months, Niagara Falls hotels are experiencing a “substantial” staffing shortage.
“We cannot get staff for frontline positions. It’s the toughest staffing environment in my long career that I’ve ever seen,” said Doug Birrell, executive director of Niagara Falls Canada Hotel Association.
“Every month, I attend meetings of all hotel associations right across the country. This is not unique to Niagara. It’s right across the country, hotels and tourism operators cannot get staff.”
He said he’d be “guessing” at a percentage of how understaffed hotels are, because every business model is different, but “it’s acute.”
There are specific positions that have been harder to convince prior staff to come back to, or to recruit new staff, including cooks in restaurants and housekeeping in hotels, said Birrell.
“The hotel industry across the country, and more so in Niagara, bled red ink for almost two years. We had to lay off all our staff, all related to COVID,” he said.
“We went from there to Stage 3, where suddenly demand started picking up and we’re trying to recall … staff and or hire new staff and we just couldn’t get a response.”
Birrell said he believes the issue is that the federal government benefits provided to people unemployed due to the pandemic “were good enough and people have become accustomed to it.”
“They just haven’t made arrangements with either daycare or whatever is going on in their lives to be able to be available to come back to work,” he said.
Birrell said the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) finishes at the end of September, and he wants to “believe that there will be a correction in the hiring environment after that when people realize that they won’t be any longer eligible for those programs.”
Birrell said, in the interim, hoteliers have been “very creative,” hiring people from outside the city.
“We’re hiring people as we can and it’s tough. At the end of the day, the bottom line is that our industry will be understaffed this summer and just try to persevere through until the fall and then until next season,” Birrell said.
He credited the federal government for providing “some assistance” to the hotel industry during the pandemic but, considering how labour intensive the sector is, and the “huge” fixed costs associated with it, “it just wasn’t enough to keep the industry whole.”
“It’s going to be a long recovery.”
Sarah Vazquez, vice-president of marketing and business development for Canadian Niagara Hotels, which operates six, said, with the border between Canada and the United States expected to reopen soon to non-essential travel, “we anticipate more traffic will definitely be coming into the destination, so, for sure, that puts a strain on everyone” when it comes to the need for more staff.
More cross-border traffic will also help businesses that rely on such visitation, she said.
Vazquez said people who used to work at hotels “took other jobs” during the pandemic and noted the local hotel industry has been “working really hard together to make things happen,” despite the staff shortage.