Tourism Employment

Analysis and Planning

Michael Riley, Adele Ladkin, Edith Szivas

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781845413927
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book is an attempt to understand tourism employment in a holistic way. Using ideas from labour economics, work psychology and industrial sociology the authors look at tourism employment in both its workplace context and its wider economic and social environment and attempt to tell a coherent story. Both behavioural and economic perspectives are used to address questions that are salient to manpower planning, education planning and tourism management. By examining the diversity and commonality within occupations against the background of a dynamic labour market the text develops themes that contribute to our understanding of the behaviour of workers and managers in the industry.

Part 1

Understanding the Industry

Chapter 1

Diversity and Planning: The Dynamic Nature of the Industry

Introduction

The intention in Chapter 1 is to introduce problems that the tourism industry bequeaths to those intending to undertake any form of planning or research in relation to labour and education. The point is not to deter but to forewarn and to encourage realism in the outputs of studies.

Difficulties in Defining Tourism

Like any other form of research or planning, labour planners come across the first hurdle – what is tourism? After decades of research in the field, it is surprising how difficult it is to reach a universally meaningful definition of tourism. Numerous attempts have been made so far – both from the supply and the demand side but finding a universally applicable definition for tourism is hampered by a number of other factors. Some of the difficulties in finding a definition are outlined in Table 1.1.

Tourism is not a recognised industry in the Standard Industrial Classification (Cooper et al., 1998) and most countries’ national accounts would not list tourism as a separate entity. In most statistical systems the best approximation we can get on tourism (and especially on tourism employment) is to look up the restaurant and catering entry. This, of course, is largely due to the fact that tourism is seen as an industry dominated by the hospitality sector.

However, tourism does not only consist of the hospitality sector and any planner must be aware of the fact that tourism is a ‘multiproduct industry’ with strong linkages to other economic sectors (Diamond, 1977). Probably the most obvious example for this inter-linkage is the transport industry where most businesses share their operation between the two sectors. To illustrate the point, consider to what extent, for example, taxi or coach companies are part of tourism?

Table 1.1 Difficulties in defining tourism

• Tourism is often not recognised as an industry

• Strong linkages with other economic sectors

• Diverse, with a range of inter-linked sectors

• Tourist use – local use mix

• Informal economy

• Traditionally seen as dominated by hotel sector

• Paucity of statistics

• Differing interpretations between countries as to what constitutes a tourist trip

Table 1.1 gives an outline of why tourism is such a hard industry to pin down. Often the official status of ‘a recognised industry’ is not conferred on tourism even when it is a major contributor to national GDP. To some extent this is explainable by the fact that it has many connections to other economic sectors and that, within itself, it has many sectors with permeable borders. To complicate matters further, the use of tourist facilities is rarely exclusive to tourists which makes the measurement of such concepts as impact that much harder.

The paucity of tourism statistics or at least their incompleteness is strongly inter-linked with the above discussed points. The dominance of the hospitality sector and the difficulty in drawing the boundaries of tourism encourage the view that the magnitude of tourism can be estimated from data on the hospitality sector. But the opposite is also true; in the absence of comprehensive data, we often resort to using hospitality-related data and narrow the discussion to the hotel and catering industries. Given the diversity in the tourism industry, this practice inevitably restricts our view of the industry and can lead to conclusions that are only partially true.

The true dimensions of the tourism industry clearly stretch beyond the hospitality sector as the industry would not function without a number of other sectors and operators who together form this complex industry. Any plan should take into account that apart from hotels, the tourism industry also includes a number of other sectors and activities, namely:

• Transport.

• Tour operators, travel agencies.

• Tourist attractions.

• Conference business.

• Tour guides.

• Tourist information services.

• Souvenir shops, beach vendors.

• Relevant government offices.

• NGOs.

• Educational establishments.

In addition to the above points, there is also the added complexity that arises from the fact that most tourist facilities are, in fact, shared between the tourists and the locals. The extent to which facilities are shared between ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’ is largely influenced by the economic distance between them and the type of tourism at the destination. Whatever the proportion of tourist usage, the important question is how do we decide which hotel or tourist attraction or shop is part of the tourism industry and which one is not?

It will come as no surprise that, as tourism is difficult to pin down, then defining tourism employment has its own problems. Just who is employed in tourism?

Defining Tourism Employment

When attempting to define tourism employment a useful starting point is supply-side definitions as they approach tourism as an aggregate of businesses and organisations. For example, a supply-side definition by Leiper (1979) states that:

the tourist industry consists of all those firms, organisations and facilities which are intended to serve the specific needs and wants of the tourists. (p. 400).

The definition is clear but it is only when we try to collate a list of these facilities for a manpower survey or labour market analysis that we realise the inherent difficulties in finding the boundaries of tourism employment (Szivas, 1999). Some of the issues are summarised below:

• Apart from the obvious choices such as hotels and travel agents, we find that most companies and establishments serve not only tourists but also locals. Restaurants, tourist attractions, taxis and other forms of transport all fall into this latter category. Recognising this, Smith (1988) classified facilities and firms serving the tourists into two levels: one tier encompasses all those establishments whose total revenue is derived from tourists, while on a second tier are those businesses which serve both the tourists and the locals as well. For our manpower survey we might opt to include those operators whose business is totally dependent on serving the tourists but by opting for this, we exclude the majority of businesses. This is especially true for developing countries where the patronage of tourism facilities is predominantly from the international tourist.

• The complexity and the neglect with which tourism is often handled at official levels means that there is no precise definition. This leads to a lack of statistics to quantify the dimensions of tourism employment (World Tourism Organisation, 1983). Consequently, the exact boundaries of tourism employment are as difficult to draw as it is to define tourism itself (Burns, 1993).

• The discussion on tourism employment tends to be focused on hotel employment. This clearly simplifies matters but has serious shortcomings as the boundaries of the industry stretch beyond the hotel sector and tourist expenditure also occurs in restaurants, shops and recreational facilities. Furthermore, tourists also use transportation and financial services, contributing to the relevant economic sectors both in their home country and at the tourist destination. They also engage in activities such as hunting or bird watching which affect the agriculture sector whilst purchases are also made in retail outlets, impacting upon the retail sector.

• In most tourist companies, part of the workforce is directly involved with dealing with the tourists, while others have no direct contact with them. If we try to define tourism employment as an aggregate of people who have direct contact with tourists we are excluding professionals such as accountants, maintenance people and baggage handlers!

• Finally, another problem in defining the boundaries of tourism employment is the prevalence of the informal economy in tourism (Shaw & Williams, 1994). Multiple occupations further complicate the matter leading to misleading employment data (Cukier-Snow & Wall, 1993).

Given the above considerations, if tourism establishments are going to be used as indicators of tourism employment then a careful set of assumptions needs to be set up for interpreting the results. The kind of variables that need to be defined are: sector of tourism, type of establishment, location and inclusive occupational titles. Clearly, to define these variables requires any study of tourism to have a ‘working definition’ at the outset. This stricture becomes even more significant when account is taken of the extent of diversity within the industry.

Diversity in the Tourism Industry

Given the breath of the industry implied above, the greatest source of diversity must come from the diverse jobs associated with different sectors of the industry. At the establishment level there is diversity in size, business type and in the extent of fluctuation of customer demand. Even within sectors there is considerable organisational diversity. This is accompanied at the occupational level by a huge variety of occupations and skills (International Labour Office, 1989b). It is therefore not surprising that forms of employment, contractual obligations, working conditions and pay vary considerably between sectors and within sectors and by organisational size across all sectors (Burns, 1993).

This diversity, be it sectoral, functional, organisational, or process is linked to a diversity of job types which in turn ensure a variety of different types of workers employed in the industry. Even given the same job its content may vary by the context in which it exists. Standard of service, size of enterprise, type of product, type of clientele, location, seasonality and required level of skills are all differentiating factors. Although tourism is seen as a service industry it would be wrong to assume that all workers are actually undertaking service tasks. In the parlance of operational research, the variety of tasks includes materials processing, customer processing and information processing. Additionally, there are variations in employment status. The industry offers jobs both on a full-time and part-time basis and requires stable and casual, seasonal and migrant labour (International Labour Office, 1989a).

Even within occupational diversity there is process diversity. At the simplest level there are manufacturing tasks, service tasks and information processing tasks and these are sometimes duplicated within one job. Across this typology we have to lay the dimensions of mass, batch and individual. Adding to this diversity is the modern operational management approach of mass customisation where mass demand is satisfied only by quasi-individualised products and services.

The implications of such diversity on planning and research are that information about jobs must be surrounded by descriptive variables that place the job in its correct industrial context. We cannot make judgements of any kind upon labour data unless it is sufficiently comprehensive. To illustrate why this is necessary take the occupation receptionist in the context of a pay survey. Job title and rate of pay convey nothing unless we also know the sector, organisational size, class of establishment and associated skill requirements. Often a considerable number of variables are needed to capture diversity. These variables include: job title, job content, job tenure, level of pay, level of skill, sector employed, type of organisation, size of organisation, status or class of organisation. These are the standard tenets of any occupational classification scheme and further discussion of the mechanics and problems of such classifications are found in Chapter 10. Manpower planning always needs a classification scheme and the general rule is that it must be capable of capturing the level of anticipated diversity. The good news is that they become easier where common skills cross sectors, which is the case in tourism. The bad news is that all classification schemes capture a static picture. The problem that remains is to cope with the dynamics, the moving parts of an industry.

The Industry Environment

In a sense the most important dynamic force in tourism is its labour market expressed by patterns of mobility. Furthermore, an element that is equally relevant to planning is the existence of a complex set of dichotomies that characterise the industry. Some built-in dichotomies are illustrated in Table 1.2.

‘Tourism exemplifies many aspects of globalisation’ (Brown, 1998: 18) yet at most destinations multinational firms operating on the global scale co-exist with large numbers of local businesses. In addition to this, the industry is characterised by a dual structure where large operators coexist with a multitude of small, often family owned businesses.

Although technological change is inevitable in the industry, in many operations high-tech and low-tech live together – E-bookings for the hotel chains, telephone bookings for the bed and breakfast operations; or management for the front-of-house but a low level of technological sophistication for housekeeping. Some people go into tourism to be successful entrepreneurs others see it as a ‘way of life’. These dichotomies do not hinder labour planning but simply make it more complex. For example, predicting rates of growth, levels of productivity and the take up of new technology will be influenced by the proportions of corporate to independent entrepreneurs in the field. There is always a certain tension between the formalities and the planning process in relation to tourism projects and the entrepreneurial spirit that lies behind them.

Table 1.2 The industry environment

• Global – local dimensions

• Dual structure: important chains and numerous independents

• Range of sizes and standards

• Geographically fragmented structure

• High tech and low tech live together

• Entrepreneurial ethos – way of life motivation

These dichotomies represent real contrasts that make a difference to working lives in the industry. Perhaps the overarcing dichotomy is that between the entrepreneurial ethos and the need for planning. Both are essential but are not easy bedfellows.

Perhaps more important for tourism employment planning is the dynamic nature of the labour market. In almost all sectors it is characterised by: occupational diversity; high proportions of young people – many in their first job; relatively low pay; an unreliable relationship between pay and tenure and between pay and skill; high levels of mobility of all types, but particularly inter-organisational mobility and upward mobility. In other words, the labour market is dynamic and, along with employers and education, a major independent player in the provision of employment. The characteristics of the market will be developed further in Chapters 4 and 5. The characteristics of the dynamic nature of the market that make difficulties for planning are outlined in Table 1.3.

Table 1.3 Difficulties for planners

• Highly elastic wage-employment relationship

• Wide range of earnings in skilled occupations

• An ability to ‘cope’by improvisation which distorts productivity measures

• High labour mobility between units

• Low occupational mobility

• Seasonality

What these features mean is that some of the key pieces of data and objectives in manpower planning are hard to obtain, for example:

• Estimating the returns to education, which are the basis of cost-benefit calculations in educational investment, is obscured first, by the partial detachment of pay from level of skill and second by the lack of credentialism in the industry.

• Levels of productivity are hard to estimate first because of the stochastic nature of demand and second by the differential and partial impact of new technology.

• The task of making comparisons in the industry is made difficult by the diversity within any single job title.

Conclusion

In this chapter we discussed some basic issues that planners and researchers need to be aware of when exploring labour market issues in tourism. Further aspects of the notion of diversity and dynamics will be addressed in the following chapters. The intention in the following chapters will be to clarify the detail of some of the issues involved and to suggest ways in which investigative techniques of manpower planning can offer solutions.

Chapter 2

Attraction and Accessibility

Introduction

It could be suggested that, in a sense, tourism employment is blighted by the confusing complexity of its own image. On the one hand, the image of tourism employment is of glamour while, on the other hand, there is evidence of low pay and low status. As with all images, there is both truth and fiction in its components. Yet images count in terms of both the quantity and quality of an industry’s labour force. To understand the effect of images of employment, it is necessary to...