Amarillo hotels facing staff shortage ahead of tourism season

AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) - As a nationwide employee shortage continues, Amarillo hotels are struggling to find staff ahead of peak tourism season.

“The entire hospitality industry in Amarillo is really struggling with staffing,” explained Kashion Smith, executive director of the Amarillo Convention and Visitors Bureau. “There have been a lot of conversations, but no big solution right now. We’re having definite challenges and we’re seeing that in housekeeping, front desk, engineers...all of the roles across the board.”

According to the Amarillo Convention and Visitors Bureau, hotels are the lifeline of Amarillo’s summer tourism revenue.

In 2019, hotels made $38 million during the months of June, July and August.

This year they expect this number to increase, but express concern over the lack of employees throughout the hospitality industry.

“We see over 3.5 million overnight visitors that stay in only the hotels. That does not count RVs, campgrounds, Airbnb...” said Smith. “We know there’s going to be challenges, but we don’t want to be so busy that when it’s all said and done we have great revenue but we damaged the reputation.”

Some hotels say to meet demand, they may have to hire third party housekeeping and hospitality services.

“As we look to open the Barfield this summer, our biggest push is to hire housekeeping and servers,” said Hannah Lambert, experience curator at The Barfield. “Our highest priority is to make sure the guests receive exceptional service, so if we do need to hire third parties we would of course never rule that out.”

Hotels speculate workers left the hospitality industry after being short staffed and overworked during pandemic lay-offs.

“I think we found that hospitality industry workers became essential workers during the pandemic...and as we had under staffing issues people of course were overworked and in some cases underappreciated,” said Lambert. “I think as we’re moving into this new chapter...[we need] to really appreciate the workers that we do have.”

The Amarillo CVB says low unemployment numbers may also contribute to the issue.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the unemployment benefits expiring, and a lot of people expect that’s going to help the workforce, but Amarillo’s unemployment is so low, I don’t know if it will really impact us that much,” said Smith.

This year, the Amarillo CVB expects hotel capacity to be between 75-80% throughout the summer.

They encourage community members to be extra welcoming and helpful to tourists, as more tourists coming back means less taxes for residents.

“Visitors in any given year can create up to 60% of our sales tax for that year and as our community grows and our population grows, we need to make sure that visitor growth happens as well or we’re going to see increased property taxes,” said Smith. “So we need to keep them longer and create more visitation.”

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