Tourism: FIHR: Hotel industry needs specialists with skills in management apps of accommodation facilities online presence

  The hotel industry needs specialists with digitalization skills in management apps of the online presence of accommodation facilities, the president of the Federation of the Hotel Industry in Romania (FIHR), Simona Constantinescu, said. Asked whether there is a deficit in the process of training dedicated staff, Simona Constantinescu replied: "There is room for growth"."HoReCa staff training companies certainly suffered the most during the pandemic, because there were no courses at all. And we suffered too, because we didn't have a trained workforce during that period, and now the volume would be much higher. (...) We don't have training only for the service side. We also need training for the digitalization part, because the optimal use of everything that means internet traffic - you've seen channel management, distribution channels through which we are visible worldwide with our offer, all these engines exist, but we still don't have enough staff to manage such platforms and engines. We need people with skills in all these applications for managing the online presence of our accommodation units," she added.The representative of the hotel industry drew attention to the need for public policies that contribute to the extension of seasonality, as keeping an employee only 3-4 months a year is not sustainable, especially in the case of digitalization specialists."Public policies to extend the seasonality, not to stay open for 3-4 months, especially at the seaside or in the delta, also help, because if you conduct your business for several months you can afford to keep your employees longer. To keep an employee for 3 or 4 months is not sustainable, because the next year you have to bring in another one, to train and teach him and there is no continuity. And then, yes, in order to keep professional people, we need public policies to help us to extend the seasons, to avoid certain taxes in the off-season so that you can keep them even if you have a small volume of business and to increase your online presence, so that foreign tourists and Romanian tourists can see you, so that they know that you are there with an offer all the time and as much as possible," explained Constantinescu.In this context, hoteliers are adapting to the volume of business with staff brought in from abroad, Asia and Africa.The honorary president of FIHR, Calin Ile, also said that the labor force was a big problem for a long time, and many tourism operators have turned to foreign staff.According to him, there are "around 10,000 foreign employees at most, out of a total of about 180,000" in the hotel industry."So, their numbers are not significant, but we see them pretty much everywhere and some of them are really doing a good job," he said.The Federation of the Hotel Industry in Romania organized the conference "Transforming the hotel industry: increasing competitiveness in the new strategic context of tourism", marking 35 years of the organization's activity.Relevant professionals from Romania and other countries attending the event presented their views on local and European changes and regulations, strategic directions for tourism at European level, local public policies needed for tourism, as well as investment trends.