In an audacious effort to recruit personnel and develop the hospitality sector in his town, the owner of a catering company purchased his own 19-room hotel to house staff.
In Mackay, Central Queensland, Adrian Connors manages his family’s company, which comprises a pub, a restaurant, four cafés, and four pie shops.
His recent acquisition of the hotel coincided with the Australian hospitality sector’s struggle to find and retain employees, especially in outlying centres.
Mr. Connors said that purchasing the hotel was his realistic solution to the staffing issues.
According to Mr. Connors, “Like any sector, we have been finding it more difficult to recruit and sustain individuals into the workplace, and we really had to look outside of how we might draw them to Mackay.”
In Mackay, there is a severe lack of housing, and it is quite expensive for single people.
The 19-room hotel owned by Mr. Connor, which is now undergoing renovations, is intended to serve as a temporary residence for his staff while they look for long-term housing in the neighbourhood.
From the Philippines, Indonesia, and Chile, he will have four foreign employees living there as of the next week.
We won’t have more than eight employees living here at once, and we’ll also be running as a standard hotel for families, business travellers, and anybody else.
Mr. Connor’s decision also highlights how competitive the rental housing market is in Queensland, where several regions have vacancy rates of less than 1%. The current rental vacancy rate in Mackay is 0.5%.
In the meanwhile, a national jobs and skills summit was conducted this week in Canberra with the goal of addressing staffing challenges and enhancing salaries and productivity.
As part of a long-term strategy and goal to acquire talented individuals, Mr. Connors expressed his hope that the summit would ease the recruitment of workers from outside to Mackay and other places.
“Our sector in Mackay hasn’t thrived in the previous 10 years, we’ve seen venues open and go, but if we attract the proper individuals, our industry can truly blossom and become a whole new vibrant offering – that’s wonderful,” the speaker said.
“We can entice individuals with excellent backgrounds and capabilities to Mackay to work as operators.”