Shannon Kyles is busy getting her 19th-century guest house in Ontario’s Prince Edward County ready for summer travellers. It’s booked most weekends this season and she’s constructing a second property, but there’s just one problem—she can’t hire enough gardeners and builders.

The owner of Gryphon Cottage has put up ads on Kijiji, but said she cares for the grass herself and 80 per cent of the company’s part-time construction workers aren’t showing up. “They’re just not there to hire,” she said.

Kyles isn’t the only one feeling the pinch, as “revenge travel” has surged after the lifting of pandemic restrictions. The Canadian tourism sector will be short about 360,000 workers this summer, Tourism HR Canada president Philip Mondor wrote in a blog post earlier this year. Sixty-two per cent of hotels are raising rates in 2023 due to rising labour costs and 47 per cent have withheld rooms due to staffing shortages, according to a February Hotel Association of Canada survey. 

More perks: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the sector lost many experienced managers from early retirement, said Mondor. Tourism businesses started offering more competitive salaries and benefits to attract talent. For example, accommodation service managers now make around $55,500 a year compared to about $44,000 in 2019, according to Tourism HR Canada’s compensation survey.

“The demand side of the competition has gone up, so the benefits have been increasing.  Salaries, of course, have gone up,” said Mondor.

Some companies ramped up training, career growth strategies and perks such as child care, free transportation and subsidized meals. The traditionally in-person industry also opened up administrative roles, such as accounting and human resources, to remote work arrangements, said Mondor. 

More tourism employers are also offering flexibility for parental duties, scheduling work rosters weeks in advance to help employees plan their family obligations, said Chris Bloore, president and CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario.

The solutions: Unlike agriculture, the tourism sector doesn’t have a specialized foreign worker scheme, putting Canada behind some European countries, said Adrienne Foster, the Hotel Association of Canada’s vice-president of policy and public affairs. “One of our major asks of this government is to carve out a specific stream for tourism workers seasonally.”

One way or another, the industry will need to fill roles ahead of the summer vacation season. “If we get some of these [tourism] businesses through the pandemic, and then they fall off because they can’t get enough staff, that will be a tragedy,” said Bloore.