Hotels still ‘wasting’ guests due to labor shortage

The hotel industry in Macau is still losing business opportunities and letting guests “get away” due to the lack of capacity for handling all the requests for room bookings, industry experts have claimed.

Although Macau hotels have done relatively well during the recent holidays of Ching Ming and Easter, professionals from the sector claim that most large-scale hotels are still limiting their guest capacity to 60% or 70% of actual capacity due to the lack of staff capable to attend to guests’ needs.

“A hotel with 200 rooms does not have as many problems as one with 3,000 rooms,” the president of the Macau Hotel Association, Luís Heredia, said in a report from Portuguese newspaper Jornal Tribuna de Macau, adding that hotels in Cotai should have only made 60% to 70% of their rooms available for bookings over the recent holidays period.

For Heredia, hotel occupancy, in general, should have reached some 80 to 85% over the holidays although it is difficult to tell exactly due to the previously mentioned fact.

According to news agency Bloomberg, several sources including Billy Song, president of the Macau Responsible Gambling Association, have also been quoted as saying that gaming operators have been forced to pull thousands of rooms from booking systems and cut back on guest services such as housekeeping, due to the labor shortage.

In the same report, it was also said that some five-star hotels in resorts made only less than half of the rooms available for booking.

Heredia also noted that many hotel units take advantage of the peak season when the room rates hike to put most if not all their workforce into operation, which causes some disruption to the daily operations.

On the same topic, the vice president of the Macau Hotel Association, Rutger Verschuren was also quoted in a different report supporting a general occupancy of between 60% to 80% over the holidays, noting that those with casinos were practically operating at full capacity.

Verschuren also noted that the manpower shortage has been forcing many hotels to call their workers in for overtime.

“In operational departments, such as cleaning or food and beverage services most hotels have their employees working overtime,” he noted.

Labor shortage explained

Two factors are affecting the operations capacity of hotels: the lengthy processes for hiring new non-resident workers (TNR) on one hand, and the fact that many of the workers who have been performing non-stop activities over the past three years are now also taking time off to reunite with their families outside Macau.

“The process of recruiting labor takes time. You have to look for people, select them, people have to be available, and all that takes time. This cannot be done within a month not even two because it’s a lot of people involved. About 30,000 to 40,000 people are lacking just in the sectors of food and beverage and room attendance,” Heredia explained noting that the Labour Affairs Bureau (DSAL) is somewhat helping to accelerate the process but the fact that it involves many people at once is stalling it.

In addition, there is another process going related to some local workers as well as TNRs, who are unsatisfied with their positions and are taking this opportunity to attempt to move to another post or company offering better conditions.

Heredia noted that the decision of hotels to cut the number of rooms available is not taken lightly and is mostly related to the need to maintain the quality of service.

He remarked that there is currently enough interest in Macau from a travelers’ point-of-view, but that Macau needs to find ways to deal with this demand.

“We need to find a solution, step-by-step to take advantage of the fact of people wanting to travel to Macau,” he concluded, forecasting that potentially by the summer time the situation might be a little more stable, but probably not much more.

Also addressing the same topic, the president of the Macao Chamber of Commerce, Frederico Ma, called on DSAL to be “more flexible” on the handling of quotas for the hiring of TNRs so that local businesses could take advantage of the rising opportunities coming from the recovery of the tourism sector.