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With most COVID travel restrictions gone, or less onerous, it’s shaping up to be a great time for the accommodation industry to rebound with vigour in the Okanagan and Kamloops.

There’s just one major dark cloud on the horizon: labour shortages.

“For sure, the shortage of labour is definitely a huge issue,” Alison Langford, the B.C. Hotel Association’s newly hired workforce strategist told iNFOnews.ca.

She’s just in the process of compiling numbers to see how bad the situation actually is, acknowledging that there were times during the COVID pandemic when hotels said they were full even though they were only at 50 to 60% capacity due to labour shortages.

“We have a serious crisis on our hands,” Langford said. “What are we collectively going to do to resolve this and why are people not going into these kinds of jobs? Why are they not interested in a hotel career or a restaurant career?”

READ MORE: More than 21,000 jobs unfilled in Thompson-Okanagan

Some answers are obvious.

Many older workers who worked seasonally in the industry for the last decade or more seem to have decided to retire, just as many other baby boomers have done in all industries.

Others, fed up with repeatedly being laid off and rehired due to COVID, have moved into other fields. Cleaners, for example, may now be working in health-care facilities.

Another huge factor was the impact of the international travel restrictions that made it impossible to recruit foreign workers.

READ MORE: Labour shortages, closed borders major obstacles to B.C. restaurant, tourism restarts

That’s now changing as borders are reopening around the world.

For the hotel industry, two programs are mainly used.

The vacation travel permit process where, usually younger people, get a visa to travel to Canada for a year or two, working at times and travelling at others. They’re important for seasonal employers and the employees are also free to come and go as they please.

The temporary foreign workers program gives employers and employees more certainty. Unlike seasonal workers in agriculture, who can only work for six months at a time, this program allows the temporary foreign works to stay for two years and that’s renewable. Their work permit is tied to one employer so the company gets some certainty that they will have a core workforce throughout the year.

On the downside for the employer, there’s a lot of paperwork involved and year-round work has to be offered in an industry that may not be busy in the offseason.

Another challenge is housing for these workers. In some resort areas, dormitories or trailers have been set up. In more rural areas, some operators have bought homes where they can recoup their mortgage payments from the rent they charge workers. Others put workers up in their hotel rooms.

Often the workers apply for permanent residency which allows them to stay indefinitely, even if they don’t choose to become Canadian citizens.

That will make up a huge portion of the hotel industry workforce but may not fill the gap left by a shift by domestic workers away from the industry that started even before the pandemic.

“In the bigger picture, the industry recognizes that it has a bit of a messaging issue,” Lanford said. “Are they attracting the kind of people they need in order to fill these positions? Is hospitality tourism an area that people are really looking to go into?”

That seems to be the case not only in B.C. or Canada, but globally.

A couple of years ago, Langford travelled to Ireland and visited a few schools whose students had travelled to B.C. for co-op or working vacation placements in Canadian hospitality industry jobs in the past. She found they were attracting far fewer students.

Recently she was able to secure federal funding for a program that’s training unemployed or underemployed people in the hospitality industry in a Lower Mainland college. The hope is their practicum training will lead to jobs with their host employers.

She applied for similar programs in Kelowna and Victoria but the funding ran out. She’s reapply since more funding has become available but it’s more likely to be next fall before those classes can start, too late for the peak summer tourist season.

It’s one of many efforts she’s tackling as she tries to attract new workers into the field or bring former employees back.

“How do we make hospitality fun again?” Langford noted as being an important question for the industry to answer.

It also has to overcome the misperception that one of the reasons people are turned off is because of low wages.

“It’s not necessarily that these jobs are lower paid,” Langford said. “That’s sort of the perception that’s out there. Maybe this is the wake-up call that employers need to either be more vocal in what they are paying their workers or to make sure, across the industry, that the employers are offering fair wages.”

When recruiting temporary foreign workers, employers must not only show they’ve tried recruiting domestically but that their wages are, at least, at the median range in their region.

For the Thompson-Okanagan region, based on Statistics Canada tables, that’s only $15.35 an hour for front office clerks but rises to $17 per hour for a light duty cleaner and reaches $25 per hour for restaurant or food services managers.

Langford’s looking for new ideas to attract workers to the industry, like Mobilize Jobs out of Toronto.

“They find people who want to explore Canada, kind of like the working holiday permit except that it’s Canadian people,” Langford said. “They’re really trying to sell the industry by saying: ‘Hey, would you like to work at a ski hill for a season?’ Wouldn’t that be fun, if I live in Newfoundland. Or, if I live in a big city, maybe I want an experience of working in a small remote community where I can go hiking every weekend or on my days off. They’ve been quite successful.”

She’s also working with the federal government with refugees who can enter the field, not as temporary foreign workers but as people on a pathway to becoming permanent citizens.

The most successful businesses are those who are also looking at multiple avenues to recruit workers into the hospitality sector.

“I’m excited to try to figure out the solutions,” Langford said. “We just need a little bit of time to recover but I think there’s a lot of really talented, experienced people working on this.

"Sometimes you’ve got to look at the silver lining. Though this pandemic, what have we learned and what do we need to do differently? If we take that approach, I’m absolutely positive things will come around.”

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