Are You Being Served?
As B.C.’S economy booms, hospitality staff are in short supply
If you’re greeted by a concierge with an Irish lilt when checking into a B.C. hotel, it may be thanks to Christine Willow. Last spring, Willow, partner at Chemistry Consulting Group and GT Hiring Solutions in Victoria, visited Irish colleges on behalf of BC Hotel Association members struggling with seasonal employment challenges. One reason the HR firm chose Ireland is that its citizens qualify for a one-year International Experience Canada visa, which allows employers to bring in post-secondary students as part of their co-op work placement or post-graduates to get international experience.
Ingrid Jarrett, GM and VP business development at the Watermark Beach Resort in Osoyoos, also goes abroad in search of staff. Last November, she travelled to Australia, where she met with universities to develop internship programs. “My restaurant was closed 50 percent of the time last summer,” laments Jarrett, who recruits from European hotel schools as well. “I had nobody to work.”
A labour market analysis by go2hr, the tourism industry’s human resource organization, projects more than 100,000 tourism and hospitality-related job openings across the province between 2012 and 2020, and an estimated shortfall of about 14,000 workers to fill them. Looking further ahead, the Canadian
Tourism Human Resource Council (CTHRC) estimates that the gap between labour supply and demand could be 228,479 jobs by 2030.
A 2016 economic impact study on B.C.’S tourism labour shortage commissioned by go2hr found that the thirst for workers began outstripping supply in 2013-14. “It’s really when the economy started taking off again,” Christine Willow explains. “My personal view is when you get to 4- or 5-percent unemployment, you’re at pretty well full employment, and so competition gets much stiffer.”
The report, prepared by Grant Thornton LLP in Vancouver and Econometric Research Ltd., based in Hamilton, Ontario, reveals how labour constraints are affecting tourism operations. Just over 50 percent of the employers surveyed said they couldn’t hire all the people they needed to function at full capacity and/or expand their business in 2014. As a result, roughly half lost revenue and more than 11 percent considered closing shop.
The most commonly cited implications of the inability to hire enough employees were:
Most of the unfilled positions were lower-skilled (56.6 percent), with 30.7 percent higher-skilled and 12.6 percent management. Although tourism includes senior positions right up to the CEO level, the industry competes with construction, IT and other sectors for the young workers who traditionally fill entry-level jobs, notes Chemistry Consulting’s Willow.
And demand for workers isn’t limited to B.C. Also looking for tourism employees are Australia, Belgium, Switzerland and the U.S., “countries that you wouldn’t even think would possibly have that shortage,” Willow says. “So competition is fierce, I would say, worldwide for hospitality and culinary staff.”– F.S.
Travellers love short- term lodging like Airbnb—the U.s.-based company has more than 18,000 hosts in B.C. alone.
Members of the hotel industry? Not so much. Ingrid Jarrett, GM and VP business development of the Watermark Beach Resort in Osoyoos, explains why. What started as true home sharing where the owner is present during the guest’s stay has expanded into using Airbnb and similar services to become commercial operators, she says. “Effectively, [short-term rental hosts] are repurposing residential homes for commercial use and are running underground hotels.”
Jarrett points out that not only do Watermark and other hotels pay commercial and income tax, commercial insurance, PST and MRDT (municipal and regional district tax, which raises revenue for local tourism marketing and programs), their owners and managers also help develop and promote local tourism experiences. She herself has a long involvement with numerous industry organizations, including as a current member of Destination BC’S tourism marketing committee, past president of the British Columbia Hotel Association and former chair of the Thompson
Okanagan Tourism Association. Jarrett also promotes the region’s culinary and agricultural tourism and is vice-chair of Slow Food in Canada.
“You’re advocating and working with municipali- ties, and you’re raising the profile of tourism so that people understand what it contributes to the community, whether it’s high-school or part-time jobs, or full-time, year-round great professional jobs,” she observes. “Those businesses don’t do any of that because it’s all under the table.”
Jarrett emphasizes that everyone offering tourist accommodation should be subject to the same rules and responsibilities. These include taxation, health and safety standards, business licences, insurance and accessibility. “Not only will this achieve fairness and a level playing field,” she notes, “it will ensure that travellers are kept safe and communities are preserved.”
Besides failing to contribute to communities, short-term rentals remove affordable housing for local workers. “Accommodation was short five years ago, and now it’s critically short—there just isn’t any,” Jarrett exclaims. “So we rent houses and apartments for an eight-month period, and then we use that for staff accommodation.” Longer term, she’s looking into building staff housing through a joint venture with the Osoyoos Indian Band.
Governments are starting to take action. Municipalities such as Nelson, Richmond, Tofino, Vancouver, Victoria and Whistler now have business licensing requirements for tourist accommodation operators, and as of February, Airbnb is collecting provincial and municipal taxes from its B.C. hosts. The provincial government, which estimates that Airbnb will remit some $16 million through the PST and an additional $5 million through the MRDT, plans to look at similar arrangements with other short-term lodging websites. –F.S.