Most of the openings are in mid-management By PAUL C. CURTIS TGI Business Editor The summer sizzled, fall is fantastic, winter will be winging, and all indications point to the island’s best year ever in terms of visitor arrivals, according
Most of the openings are in mid-management
By PAUL C. CURTIS
TGI
Business Editor
The summer sizzled, fall is fantastic, winter will
be winging, and all indications point to the island’s best year ever in terms
of visitor arrivals, according to the president of the Hawai’i Hotel
Association’s Kaua’i chapter.
Henry Perez, general manager of the Lawa’i
Beach Resort and HHA-Kaua’i president, predicts 1.3 million visitors to Kaua’i
by year’s end, well up from the 1.1 million arrivals counted in 1990, and the
1,267,620 in 1991.
The September Kaua’i visitor arrival count of 85,000
marked the best September since 1991, when 101,090 visitors arrived.
Even
with the industry’s successes this year, there aren’t enough openings at hotels
from Waimea to Ha’ena to absorb all 400 Amfac Sugar Kaua’i workers who later
this week will lose their jobs.
Amfac Sugar Kaua’i (ASK) announced in
mid-September its intent to halt all agricultural operations on this island
effective this Friday, Nov. 17. Most of the 400 workers will also join the
ranks of the unemployed that day.
Perez said the hotel industry will be
able to absorb some of the displaced ASK employees, but definitely not all of
them. Many of the openings at properties on the island are in
middle-management, where hotel management experience is preferred. Front-desk
managers, accountants and accounting managers, reservations managers, and
similar positions are typically filled either by moving up current hotel
employees, bringing experienced workers from other properties within the same
chain, or hiring people away from competitor properties, he
explained.
Where a lot of the available jobs are concerned, he said, most
of the ASK workers plain don’t have the necessary training, skills or
experience.
Still, at last Thursday’s job fair for ASK workers and others
looking for jobs, several hotels passed out applications and interviewed
prospective workers, in positions as varied as housekeeping and room
attendants, security, cooks, dishwashers, food and beverage workers, bus
attendants, and waithelp, at properties from Hanalei Colony Resort in Ha’ena to
the Hyatt Regency Kaua’i Resort & Spa in Po’ipu.
The Hyatt had the most
job listings, 17, including two management positions and several entry-level
jobs. The Hyatt is the island’s largest hotel, with 700 rooms and around 1,500
employees.
Regarding the current list of job openings, one employee manager
said that changes virtually daily, as employees are hired and promoted, or
fired, or when they quit.
Getting back to the booming tourism industry,
Perez said October was a very good month for the island’s hotels, and November
and December are shaping up to be “great.”
The Hyatt is virtually sold out
this month, with Tiger Woods and the PGA Grand Slam of Golf set for the Po’ipu
Bay Golf Course later this month, followed by a traditionally strong
Thanksgiving weekend.
Even if the first two weeks of December are as
traditionally slow as they usually are, December is still shaping up to be a
strong ending to a Herculean year of tourism on the island, Perez
continued.
While some hotels are already reporting sold-out periods for
much of June and July next year, predictions are for an overall flat
visitor-arrival year in 2001, due to a lack of inventory, he said.
The
Hyatt, for example, figured it could fill 400 additional rooms with guests
wishing to stay there during certain periods this year, guests they had to turn
away because the hotel didn’t have the rooms to offer, said Perez.
Still, a
flat year (in terms of percentage growth in arrivals) will still portend
another good year for Kaua’i tourism, he concluded.
Business Editor
Paul C. Curtis can be reached at pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
