With the arrival of the warmer weather, hotels not only have to be ready for the guest traveler, but managers in the hospitality industry also have to manage employee vacation requests. This is a situation that can quickly become a nightmare without a plan in place. It’s not news that an unorganized vacation schedule can create havoc for an operations department.
Create a Procedure
You must establish a vacation leave request system that staff members adhere to. Indicate in your method how far in advance an employee needs to submit a request. Many businesses ask for a set period of time, like two weeks.
When it comes to managing time off, you can never be too sure of anything. Whether you are a GM or food and beverage director, sit down with your managers to go over summer projections and vacation policies. You need to be able to dial into busy periods that will have to be blacked out as well as set limits on how many employees can go on vacation at any given time.
Planning Vacations/Blackout Periods
This taps into the point made above in that you need to accurately forecast the business for the entire summer to ensure employee vacations do not put the operation at risk. You will no doubt have busy times during the summer where it will be all-hands-on-deck. Identify these periods and post them so the staff can plan accordingly.
Prioritize Requests
Vacations should run on a first-come, first serve basis. You can run with variations of this, but the vacation of someone that told you two months ago should not be discarded for someone with seniority that tells you the week before the date they want off. This is a policy that should be covered during the hiring process as well as something that can be mentioned throughout the year when heavy vacation requests are expected.
Ask for Flexibility and Reward It
In some cases, merely juggling the schedule a bit will help cover vacation requests. For instance, you have a full complement of evening workers but have two vacation requests for your daytime shift. Ask your evening shift workers if they can move over to day work to cover those specific periods. You can even offer a pay differential to make it more attractive to them.
Hotels generally have an ample supply of part-time workers available to them. As soon as you have your vacation requests, reach out to your part-timers to see if they are interested in pulling full shifts for a week or more. This enables you to cover shifts without having to use a temp agency.
If it becomes a worst-case scenario where you underestimate staffing or late business pops up and you do need to use a staffing agency, get your request in as soon as possible to reserve the best possible staff. The last thing you want is a skeleton chain with temp workers that have never worked at your property.