Representatives of the two largest hotel groups in Madeira – Pestana and Porto Bay – admitted this afternoon, in Funchal, that tourism is in a good moment, with high demand, but is struggling with a problem of shortage of labor. which, for now, will be minimized with the recruitment of personnel abroad and the increase in salaries.
“English is spoken in our kitchen. And it’s not Oxford English. It is the English of Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It’s because? Because there are many functions today in which we are unable to recruit in Portugal”, said Bernardo Trindade, from the Porto Bay group, at the conference of the Portuguese Tax Association, which takes place in the afternoon at the Legislative Assembly of Madeira. The Madeiran manager sees in the countries of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) a streak of staff recruitment, but he argued that it is also necessary to “look at remuneration schemes” in order to make the hotel sector “more glamorous” from the point of view of view of job opportunities.
Paulo Prada confessed that Grupo Pestana is already taking decisions to make the hotel professions “more glamorous and sexy”, with increases in salary items. But he fears that even this is not enough and he gave an example: “In our London hotel before the pandemic we had 90 such employees and today we only have 30, even though the remuneration of each one has increased considerably”. By the way, both Paulo Prada and Bernardo Trindade acknowledged that the shortage of available personnel is not an exclusive difficulty for Madeira or Portugal, as it “pervades all of Europe”. They also recognized that it does not result exclusively from the reinforcement of social support granted to workers and companies in the most acute months of the pandemic.