While October is considered high season for tourism, finding employees for hotel and resort properties is at its lowest in Sedona.
Searching for and retaining employees has become an issue — but many hoteliers say that this isn’t anything new.
However, they are finding that employees are not in any rush to get back into the workforce since the rise and fall of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some employers say potential employees are holding out for higher hourly wages, others say employees don’t want to do the menial tasks sometimes required as part of the job and many have left the hospitality industry completely. The search for housekeepers, front desk managers and even executive positions has been harder, leaving managers to work multiple shifts to get the job done.
Staffing Down 20%
Overall, hoteliers are saying that staffing is down 20% in Sedona, and they are trying to hire every day.
Stan Kantowski, managing director of Enchantment Resort, one of the largest resort properties in the area, said that this situation is not new. Kantowski has been at Enchantment for four years and said that it has always been a challenge to hire qualified people.
“It always has been an issue, but when the short-term rentals came online, that elevated the problem because of the demand for the destination,” Kantowski said. “That has pushed people from Sedona’s workforce to Cottonwood, Clarkdale and Cornville. It has always been a challenge here in the market. We are in the same boat [as everyone else]. We operate one of the largest resorts in the county, so we require a lot of people to help us serve our customers, and we have to be creative in how to attract and retain the team that we have.”
Many hotels are down several employees, some as many as 10, making the day-to-day operations difficult.
Cheryl Barron, general manager of the Courtyard by Marriott, found herself recently in the kitchen making breakfast for guests as well as managing front desk duties.
She said hotel guests are not empathetic as she explains the situation.
“The guests are rather upset, a little angry, and they want what they want and are not concerned about staffing,” she said. “Pre-COVID, if we had a housekeeping situation, guests were more gracious and more accepting, and we had a better chance of overcoming objections. Now they want a free room complaining they did not get what they paid for.”
Barron said that Marriott staff have placed letters in the rooms alerting guests that the hotel has limited housekeeping — but that has had little effect.
“Guests are complaining that room rates have been consistent but they have less service,” Barron said. “We are doing things as fast as we can. It’s a tough situation to be in right now.”
Hotels are charging a higher average daily rate, some double. As they make more money per room, wages for employees have increased modestly. Many hospitality jobs are currently starting at $14 to $17 per hour, but retaining employees has become more difficult. Some short-term rental management companies have started paying per unit versus an hourly wage.
Shift by Employees
“There is no loyalty with employees — they are going where the money is and who can pay them the most for the work they are going to do,” Barron said. “The employees really have the say. They are the ones dictating right now because we need people badly.”
Barron had 64 employees before COVID-19; currently, that fluctuates between 40 to 50 employees — depending on who shows up.
“We are accepting behaviors that I assure you we would never accept in the past,” she said. “On any given day I have 44 employees. But, of that number, half of them call out more than two or three times over a three-week period. Their excuses range anywhere from not feeling good, ‘I’m stressed out, or I have anxiety issues.’”
Arabella Sedona, a 144-room hotel, is experiencing much of the same issues. General Manager Julia Kaiser, like Barron, reports that she is doing extra jobs like housekeeping, along with her management team and that everyone is operating at full capacity. She is concerned about employee burnout.
“It’s not an employer presenting a job to a candidate,” Kaiser said. “It’s more of a candidate telling the employer what fits their schedule and what they need. Over the last year it has gotten significantly worse. They [employees] will come and say, ‘I don’t want to do the beverage station if I am a front desk agent. I don’t want to refresh ice tea and water for our guests.’”
“I don’t have clear-cut answers,” she said. “We are trying to fill the positions of our hourly staff so that our superstars don’t burn out — but you have people calling in sick and you don’t have enough people to cover the shift. This is what we do — it’s hospitality and it is very challenging to continue doing this for a very long time.”
Changing Business Practices
“Where are we going to get these employees? I wish we knew,” said Candace Carr Strauss, president and CEO of the Sedona Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Bureau. “Nationally, we are short 2 million workers — the number of jobs that are out there versus the number of people working. Until we can print 3D human bodies we are going to have to do things differently or do without.”
“This isn’t unique to Sedona,” she said. “I sit on the U.S. Travel Association Board and we had this discussion on the workforce in hospitality tourism and as an industry, we have lost jobs. How are we going to fill those positions when people who were laid off due to the economic downturn from the industry went and found other jobs that weren’t as hard and maybe paid the same or better or allowed more flexibility with their family and they didn’t have to work nights and weekends and they are not going to return to our industry?”
Carr Strauss, Kaiser and Barron said that many workers are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorders, rethinking their careers and questioning whether or not they even want to stay in the hospitality industry.
Wages
In addition, workers are jumping from job to job to any employer that is offering more money and few are working at minimum wage.
On Jan. 1, the Arizona minimum wage is set to increase 65 cents to $12.85 an hour. While hotels and resorts are offering their housekeeping and front desk employees higher wages, the amounts are still not considered a living wage, which is estimated at $14.82 in Yavapai County. Employees have to work two or three jobs in order to pay the exorbitant rents — if they can even find a place to begin with.
Kaiser said that Arabella Sedona is currently producing recruitment videos and trying to look for different ways of attracting employees. She said that traditionally word-of-mouth worked best for hiring housekeepers, but now they are trying to be more innovative on how they present themselves to prospective employees.
Housing Options
With the influx of home sales over the last several months and more short-term rentals, there are fewer places for workers to find housing. Affordable housing is limited. Hoteliers say that the problem is getting worse as they can’t hire employees who don’t live in the area because there is no place for them to live.
“Affordable housing is the No. 1 reason some of my managers have to travel from Prescott, which is a burden,” Kaiser said. “They have to drive I-17, deal with car accidents, road construction and if it snows, they cannot get here. Then, we have managers that are applying for the positions from out of state and they cannot live here because they cannot afford housing. We have management team members who are rethinking their careers and are questioning whether they should stay in the hospitality industry or move to a different industry because it has been so stressful over the last two years.”
Kantowski said he can offer accommodations to some of his workforce, which other hotels do not have.
“We are fortunate that we are able to accommodate some of our workforce,” he said. “We have apartments in Clarkdale and we provide complimentary shuttles from very early in the morning to very late at night to those apartments, with stops in the Cottonwood area to pick up people who don’t want to drive all the way. It is important that we assist our team members to come to work and to safely get home. That’s a big element for us having more housing.”
In addition, Kantowski said that he hires international workers for positions that are hard to fill. The H-2B visa non-immigrant program permits employers to hire foreign workers to come temporarily to the United States for seasonal employment.
He also hires exchange students on J-1 visas, which was limited recently because of the travel ban, and expected to lift in November. He said that most of his workers are coming to the United States from Africa, Jamaica and Guatemala.
There are 65 hotels in the Sedona area including timeshares, hotels/resorts and traditional bed and breakfasts, for a total of 4,300 rooms. Adding to that number are an additional 2,800 short-term rentals rooms.
“The growth of a few new hotels is going to exacerbate the situation of finding workers with the addition of Oak Creek Resort with 92 rooms, Ambiente Sedona with 80 rooms and the Residence Inn by Marriott adding 100 rooms to Sedona. However, new hotels are mandated by the city to add affordable housing on their property,” said Debra Shinn, of Shinn Hospitality Consulting. Shinn has been in the market for 12 years and has worked at Sedona Rouge, now renamed The Wilde Resort & Spa.
“The hotels need to provide ‘X’ amount of affordable housing based on however many rooms they are adding to their inventory,” she said. “Affordable housing doesn’t necessarily have to go to the hotel employees but needs to go to a person who is a Sedona employee,” she said.
Future Employment
Shinn believes that the future employee will need to be cross-trained in a multitude of jobs to alleviate this situation. Raising salaries to retain employees is definitely needed, she added.
“I think we should forget the sign-on bonuses that some of the hotels are offering to attract new employees,” Shinn said. “What about the people that have been working on property doing two, three and four jobs working overtime? Let’s give them the bonuses first to retain them.”
Steve Segner, owner of El Portal Hotel and president of the Sedona Lodging Council, agrees that businesses need to treat employees differently.
“The idea of telling your employees to go home early when we are not busy has changed,” he said. “We have to change our whole philosophy in how we treat our employees. In the old days we would lay them off. They [employees] aren’t putting up with that anymore, and they want certain things and money is just a part of it.”
Enchantment is offering benefits beyond what others are offering to retain employees.
In addition to health and retirement benefits, Kantowski said, “we provide complimentary, freshly cooked meals to all our team members. We offer incentives to our full-time employees including a bonus program. We have recognition programs that celebrate good performance, and we are celebrating our people in different ways.”
