CT’s hotels face a worker shortage. The hiring squeeze means industries competing with each other.

More than 4,000 job openings were posted by Connecticut hotels in 2022 — double the number before the pandemic — and Victor Antico knows painfully well how tough it can be to make a hire.

Antico, the operator of the Holiday Inn Express in Vernon, recently needed to fill a front desk job at the 70-room hotel. He got 50 hits on an online posting, and he contacted 20. Half agreed to an interview but only three showed up.

“It’s the exact opposite of what it used to be,” Antico, who has owned and operated the hotel since the late 1990s, said. “Now, if I schedule 10 interviews, we’re averaging about 40% actually show up for the interview, even with a text reminder the day before.”

Employers are running into hiring troubles across many industries in Connecticut, with nearly 100,000 openings going unfilled. Hotels are part of the broader hospitality industry that includes restaurants, also beset by hiring woes.

But for hotels, the employment picture is particularly acute. The overall industry, which suffered a devastating downturn when Covid-19 shut down travel, is still struggling to regain its footings. Finding new employees is an added complication.

Although hotel operators say the business is moving in the right direction toward recovery, there are still uncertainties about crucial corporate travel bookings and the extent to which they will return in the coming years.

Connecticut’s hotels also are a crucial component of the state’s tourism industry, which contributed $15.5 billion to the state’s economy in 2019, according to a state report. The spending plunged in the teeth of the pandemic, but has recovered, in large part, due to a surge in leisure travel in 2022 that now appears to be dropping back to more normal levels, hotel operators say.

Nationally, the hotel industry is experiencing a similar hiring squeeze as in Connecticut.

A new survey by the American Hotel & Lodging Association of nearly 500 hotel operators nationwide found that more than 80% were experiencing staff shortages, with 40% reporting that the most critical need was in housekeeping.

The industry lobbying group also found a surge in hiring incentives to fill vacancies. Of those surveyed, 75% were boosting wages, 34% were offering greater flexibility with work hours and 36% expanding benefit packages. Even so, 87% of those responding said they still haven’t been able to fill positions.

And most troubling, 26% of hotel operators surveyed found staffing shortages so severe that it threatened the hotel’s ability to operate.

In Vernon, Antico noted that minimum wage in Connecticut rose to $15 a hour earlier this month, but “we had to be above it anyways just to compete.”

A full staff at the Holiday Inn Express is about 20 positions and currently numbers about 18. So, last week on a particularly busy day, when one employee called out sick, it delayed the delivery of rooms past the 3 p.m. check-in time, with other employees working a longer day, Antico said.

Antico said he was always appreciative of his employees but it is even more so now with difficulties in hiring. When workers stayed longer to cover for the sick employee, he paid for Uber and Lyft fares because they missed their bus ride home.

“I can’t ask them to work late, and then they’ve got to pay for an Uber home,” Antico said.

‘That’s who your competition is’

Employment in Connecticut’s hotel and lodging industry reached an annual average of 11,800 in 2018, prior to the pandemic, according to the Connecticut Department of Labor. The number of workers plunged by nearly 40%, to 7,100 in 2020. By last year, hotel employment had climbed back to 9,300. So far, through May of this year, employment has remained steady at 9,300, the labor department said.

In 2019, there were 2,042 job openings, compared with 4,052 last year. So far this year, through May, there have been 1,713 and are on a pace to exceed 2022 if hiring does not begin to outpace postings, according to the labor department.

Ginny Kozlowski, executive director of the Connecticut Lodging Association, said the competition for workers is not just among hotels but with other industries that also are recruiting employees for similar jobs.

“Whether you’re a dishwasher in assisted living — that’s who your competition is — it’s not just a hotel dishwasher, a restaurant dishwasher.” Kozlowski said. “It could be a health care facility. It could be a hospital. If you’re looking for room attendants, you’re competing for a room attendant that could be working at Hartford HealthCare. We know hospitals are very busy.”

Economists say the difficulty in making new hires in Connecticut is part of a broader decline in the state’s workforce, accelerated by the pandemic. Some workers left the workforce and have yet to return. Others have found a niche in the “gig economy” tailoring their work to their own preferred time schedules. The state’s unemployment rate is lower than it has been in decades.

And, because of the large number of job openings, there is more confidence in leaving a job because it is likely there will be another one, they say.

“I would expect that the hotel industry would be part of that,” Patrick J. Flaherty, economist at the state labor department said. While there is a difficulty in hiring, “I would suggest that perhaps it’s also a question about retention.”

Flaherty said the underpinnings of the Connecticut economy are strong — 5,000 jobs were added in May — but number of people quitting their jobs and presumably moving to others is about 4,000 a month, a far faster pace than prior to the pandemic.

The Waterford Group, a major hotel operator in Connecticut, including two in downtown Hartford and one at Bradley International Airport, said it has “numerous” openings in Connecticut. Waterford said it is using a variety of incentives, including promoting a company culture of career development, to hold on to its employees.

“A great percentage of people that started working with us a year or two years ago — I would say that 40% — are not in the position they were when they started because they’ve really been able to grow their personal careers,” Len Wolman, Waterford’s chairman and chief executive, said. “It’s better for them, and it’s better for us.”

Wolman, who has four decades of experience in the hospitality industry, said many hotels also have turned to contract labor, who are paid by the project rather than by the hour, to fill some positions.

“It’s not easy to get enough staff to staff these facilities as we are recovering,” Wolman said. “Unemployment is really low.”

‘Question of the moment’

Traditionally, corporate travel accounted for 60% of bookings at Connecticut hotels, with 40% taken up by leisure travel. In 2022, however, those percentages flip-flopped as the pandemic-weary hit the road in the summer.

But mid-way through 2023, there are early signs that inflation — and the resulting higher prices — may be tempering enthusiasm for vacation travel.

“Are we going to be able to sustain those numbers from 2022?” the hotel association’s Kozlowski said. “That seems to be the question of the moment.”

Waterford’s Wolman said he is starting to see mid-week corporate bookings improve, but they are nowhere near the levels prior to the pandemic. That is likely tied to an uneven return of workers to the office and the adoption of Zoom meetings and other virtual platforms, Wolman said.

In downtown Hartford — very much dependent on corporate travel bookings — hotel occupancy was nearly 61% for the first four months of 2023, the latest data available from STR, a global hospitality data and analytics company. That compares with about 66% in the same period in 2019, STR said.

In the broader Hartford market, hotel occupancy was nearly 58% through April of 2023, compared with 57% for the same period in 2019, according to STR.

At Vernon’s Holiday Inn Express, owner and operator Antico said there wasn’t a lot of patience from guests when there were gaps in service from the pandemic’s upheaval and the labor shortage that has followed.

“But now, the word is out there that there is a service labor crunch — and I’ve got to tell you — the last month or two, people have been extremely pleasant,” Antico said. “They’re like, ‘You guys can’t find any help, either?’ And we’re like, “You know anybody?’ And they’re like laughing.”

Kenneth R. Gosselin can be reached at kgosselin@courant.com.