All in all at Sandaya. In February, this group of campsites launched its attack plan to recruit 2,400 people: entertainers, cooks, receptionists, cleaners, site managers… The objective: to avoid meeting again, like the 2022 season. , with several hundred vacancies and cascading problems. “In restaurants, we had to close on certain days or reduce hours. Housekeeping was also very complicated. We called on interim companies, but it cost us a lot of money and it wasn’t the service we were expecting.”explains François Georges, the boss of the group.
In 2023, at Sandaya, a whole catalog of new measures is being rolled out: salary increase (up to +20% for certain professions), creation of a co-option bonus (up to 250 euros) for any employee who recommends a candidate from his entourage, a return bonus (from 200 to 500 euros) for those who return from one year to the next, increase ” a third ” the number of accommodations offered to staff, etc. “The first signals seem to say that it is working”notes François Georges.
Will the tourism sector succeed in rethinking its jobs in order to make them more attractive? Since the Covid-19 pandemic, recruitment difficulties have worsened, in particular because the long periods of interruption and general slowdown in activity, in 2020 and 2021, have prompted many employees to branch off to other horizons.
At Belambra, among the 450 regular seasonal workers, 175 have since “disappeared”. “People who had been loyal to us for years put down their pencils and said to us: I can no longer, relates Alexis Gardy, the president of these holiday clubs. They spent time with family, they had time to think about their future. With hindsight, certain constraints related to the sector have become unbearable to them. »
In France, around 250,000 jobs are to be filled in the hotel and restaurant industry alone. “We may have had an extra year 2022, we could have done 5% to 10% more if we had not reduced the offer due to a lack of staff. And this is starting to give rise to friction between employers, who steal their best people »comments Christian Mantei, president of Atout France.
“Lack of consideration”
So how can we attract more young people to this sector? There is work to do, because it is the whole vision of these professions that must be rethought, explains Dominique Marcel, president of the Alliance France Tourisme, a think tank which produced a report on this subject, end of 2022. “We have a cultural problem with the tourism professions, which are assimilated to servitude”, he observes.
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