Tourism activities face a bottleneck amid the process of business resumption in the country. This is the shortage of skilled labor.
The framework challenges the filling of part of the job vacancies available in companies such as travel agencies and hotels.
According to analysts and businessmen, the situation can be associated with the effects of the pandemic. With the arrival of the health crisis, in 2020, the demand for tourist activities plummeted, and workers suffered massive layoffs.
From the vaccination against Covid-19, the scenario was reversed. The demand for travel has reacted in recent months and has stimulated rehiring. The point is that, throughout the crisis, part of the already trained professionals had to migrate to other activities in search of income.
A portion of the group, say analysts and businessmen, has not yet returned to the tourism industry. And maybe not even back anytime soon. Hence the mismatch, as certain functions require some level of specialization.
This is the case, for example, of travel operators. These workers are responsible for putting together tour packages, says Roberto Nedelciu, president of Braztoa (Brazilian Association of Tour Operators).
“They are professionals who need to know about travel, about available tours, about hotel options. In the case of international travel, there is also the issue of foreign language. It is a role that has been difficult to replace.”
“We just didn’t sell more in recent months because of the difficulty in hiring specialized labor”, he adds.
According to businessmen, agencies have been betting on training, but these tasks are often considered complex.
“We saw people who left the area in the pandemic and still haven’t returned”, says Frederico Levy, vice president of marketing and events at Abav (Brazilian Association of Travel Agencies).
“The agencies returned to operate with a reduced number of people. To train a junior professional, the support of a senior is required, and this can be complicated. The senior could be operating.”
Travel agencies and tour operators had 63,700 formal jobs in stock in Brazil in January 2020, before the restrictions in the pandemic. The data is part of the federal government’s Caged (General Register of Employed and Unemployed).
During the crisis, this number even dropped to the range of 40 thousand, rising in sequence with the advance of vaccination against Covid-19.
In June of this year, the most recent period with available statistics, the stock reached 48,700 formal jobs. The indicator corresponds to the total number of vacancies in force.
“The scenario became more positive in 2022 with the retreat of the health crisis and the advance of vaccination”, evaluates economist Fabio Bentes, from CNC (National Confederation of Trade in Goods, Services and Tourism).
In the case of travel agencies, admissions grew 131% among workers with higher education in the first half of this year, compared to the same period in 2021, according to a survey produced by Bentes, based on Caged. The advance was 104% on average for all levels of education.
In nominal terms (without discounting inflation), the admission salaries of workers with complete higher education had a positive variation of 6.1% on the same basis of comparison, while the general average was 0.82%, points out the economist.
Even without taking into account inflationary losses, the nominal increase, together with the increase in occupation, may indicate a shortage of more qualified labor, according to Bentes.
By the same logic, in periods of plenty of workers, one of the possible consequences would be a lower admission salary.
Hotels and events do not escape
In addition to agencies, hotels and event companies also find it difficult to fill part of the vacancies at the moment, points out Mariana Aldrigui, president of the FecomercioSP Tourism Board and a researcher at USP (University of São Paulo).
“Many professionals did not see security to remain in the area”, he recalls. “We’ve had a lot of migrations.”
In comparison with tourist activities, sectors such as technology can offer higher salaries and more flexible working conditions, without the need for face-to-face work, says Aldrigui. This, according to her, challenges the entry of young people in the tourism sector.
“It was even difficult to bring back to the office part of the staff who were working from home”, says Monica Paixão, general director of the Le Canton resort, in Teresópolis (about 120 km from Rio de Janeiro).
The businesswoman says that the biggest bottleneck at the moment is filling “more operational” vacancies. These are functions that may involve, for example, the need to travel, follow up on events and work on weekends.
In January 2020, before the pandemic, hotels and the like had a stock of 316,300 formal jobs in Brazil, according to Caged. The number even dropped to close to 230,000 during the first year of the crisis.
With the economic reopening, the stock grew again. In June this year, it reached 297,500 vacancies.
“Here in Rio we had an exceptional high season, starting on New Year’s Eve”, says Alfredo Lopes, president of HotéisRIO (Sindicato dos Meios de Alojamentos of the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro).
“We rehired, but we saw that people looked for other tasks, and there is a lack of already qualified workforce. Work in hotels needs training, because there are norms of behavior, of governance”, he adds.
According to Lopes, functions such as receptionist are among the most demanded at the moment. “The difference between a hotel and other companies is that there is no robot. The receptionist is a person.”
Possible brake in 2023
In the wake of the economic reopening, the index of tourist activities calculated by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) has shown signs of reheating in the country since the second half of last year. But as of June 2022, it was still 2.8% below the pre-pandemic level (February 2020).
For Mariana Aldrigui, from FecomercioSP and USP, repressed demand and compulsory savings made by families in the crisis have been stimulating the tourism sector, even in the current scenario of inflationary pressure.
The concern, he says, is more focused on 2023, when these impulses tend to lose their impetus, and projections indicate less breath in the economy.
“When inflation erodes wages, and household savings are spent, what is cut first? Superfluous spending”, he concludes.
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