Where are employees?

Many a time I have written this editorial asking questions regarding tourists. Where are the foreign tourists? When are they coming? But now, we must talk about another burning issue that is impacting all of us – where are the employees? Most teams are short-staffed. There is a massive crunch of skilled employees, and no one seems to be able to find the right balance. Recently, a travel company co-founder on social media highlighted the hiring issue. He went out and discussed that candidates accept job offers and eventually don’t show up on the joining date. While this is a huge waste of time and resources, there is no way of controlling or preventing it. His tweet opened a pandora’s box of stories and experiences. While most employers agreed to the problem, the employees had interesting arguments to make. Why is this happening? The tourism and hospitality industry saw massive job losses in the last two years with job security being extremely compromised. A lot of employees chose to explore other well-paying industries and don’t want to come back now. There was no time spent on skill development in the sector since the pandemic and the industry lost out on some great talent.

The tourism industry across Asia was largely an informal employment sector with limited benefits for employees. Moving into a different industry has created a sense of security and as an industry, we will need to recreate this in the tourism ecosystem again.

On the international front, in 2020, 62 million jobs were lost, representing a drop of 18.6 per cent leaving just 271 million employed across the sector globally, compared to 333 million in 2019. 18.2 million jobs were recovered in 2021, representing an increase of 6.7 per cent year-on-year. This year, while the recovery numbers are expected to be higher, it’s going to be a few years before tourism can recover to the pre-pandemic levels. While the opportunities to excel in tourism are coming back, let's hope employees also continue to maintain integrity and only look for job opportunities when they are ready to make the move.