The best of the Folo: Hotels are coming back, but are staff?

Americans are continuing to travel, even as demand rises and falls due to delta hotspots. And hotels are continuing to struggle with staffing. Acting hotels editor Tovin Lapan has continued to cover the trend, writing in a recent issue of Travel Weekly that it may not be a sure bet that applications will roll in once additional federal unemployment benefits expire in September. For the bulk of this episode, we’ve returned to a conversation recorded earlier this year between retail/hotels editor Christina Jelski and David Sherwyn, a professor and hospitality expert at Cornell University, about hotel-worker issues back then: Why employees may not be eager to return to hotel front lines, whether properties would turn to contract labor and the role of labor unions during the pandemic. The interview with Jelski and Sherwyn was recorded April 21, when vaccines were just starting to roll out in full force and before the delta variant rose, so a few of the micro issues in the podcast may no longer be current, but overall we think the primary issues discussed are as relevant as they were in the spring. Related reading: Unemployment benefits ending, but hotels’ labor woes may continue https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/Unemployment-benefits-and-hotel-labor-woes Opinion: Daily hotel housekeeping may be a permanent Covid casualty https://www.travelweekly.com/Christina-Jelski/Daily-hotel-housekeeping-may-be-a-permanent-Covid-casualty How tough is the labor market for employers, exactly? https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/Difficult-hotel-labor-market-ALIS GMs clean rooms and operators cook as hotels struggle to rehire workers https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/GMs-clean-rooms-and-operators-cook-as-hotels-struggle-to-rehire-workers Five hotel general managers on the lessons they learned during the pandemic: https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/Focus-on-Hotels-What-the-pandemic-taught-me See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.