Travel bosses have agreed that more must be done to “incentivise” prospective talent to join or return to the hospitality and travel industries post-pandemic.

The chief executive of Six Senses Hotels Resorts Spas, Neil Jacobs, acknowledged recruitment was a “global issue” and said travel brands must be willing to increase their pay and do more in the areas of training and education to encourage people to return. 

“To find and train amazing people is not simple, and certainly not as we come out of Covid,” he said.

“Everyone is talking about how challenging it is to find employees, because during Covid, so many people in hospitality left the industry. They found other jobs and don't want to come back. That's a big issue right now. Hopefully, that will sort itself out over the next year or two, but we're all suffering. It's a global issue.

“We have to get better at incentivizing. Inflation is everywhere, salaries have gone up; we need to be ready to pay what we need to pay. We also need to do a better job of going into local communities and schools and looking at attitude perhaps more so than experience. [It’s about] having the capability within one's organisation to really train people. If people are good people, and if they care about the job, you can actually train most jobs.”

Nena Chaletzos, founder of online travel agency Luxtripper, said companies were currently dealing with a candidate-driven market and had to work harder to make their proposition “attractive and relevant”. 

“A candidate might have three or four offers on the table, so how is it that you're going to make your offering more attractive and relevant?” she said.

Chaletzos said Luxtripper has done a “lot of work” on its benefits, launching ‘unlimited’ holidays and a work-from-anywhere policy. Chaletzos also recently hired an in-house life coach for staff to use for both professional and personal concerns.  

“My background is HR so during the pandemic all I thought about was ‘how do I create the best life for [my staff]?’” she said.

“Every day it’s on the leadership agenda. We have a call every day and the first topic we talk about is people, before numbers or anything else. Your business is your people. And if you get it right with people, they're going to give a great service to customers. So we invested heavily in that and we do a lot of our PR around that.”

Lisa Fitzell, managing director of Elegant Resorts and If Only, also worked on creating a great working environment over the pandemic.

“We want to create this environment where it's a fantastic culture and people want to be there,” she said.

“I strongly believe if you create that and you look after your people, you will keep them so we haven't had a lot of people leave. We've definitely had people approached for a lot more money so there's a lot of that going on. But it's never always about the money. It has to have more meaning than that.”

Both Elegant Resorts and If Only have wellness ambassadors and mental health first aiders, and offer group hit classes and yoga.

Both companies also went “completely hybrid” last September with “no change in productivity”, according to Fitzell.

“We're getting more sales per sales consultant than we've ever done so there's no evidence to say that that is doing anything but working,” she added.

“We've just got to work really, really hard to attract the best talent and to create a fantastic atmosphere. You can't be complacent about that at all.”

Both Fitzell and Mark Duguid, chief executive of Carrier, said they “went early” with recruitment at the end of last year – a gamble that paid off as travel returned.

Duguid said: “Our business is our people, it’s all about expertise. We say it takes two years to train someone up, not just to adapt to our systems and be knowledgeable about the destinations, but to be competent and to build relationships with agents. And so for that reason, I did go early and yes, it was a risk.

“My recruitment was essentially done by December last year. By going early I feel we got the best people in the marketplace and crucially it meant I got to keep and retain much of my existing team. Demand grew in January, February and March and from April onwards it feels that it's back to business as usual. We're not perfect, there will be the odd occasion where things go wrong, but operationally our business is in a very sound place right now.”