After the closing of the Christmas campaign, the hotel sector is already preparing for the 2024 season, which is quite promising.

This feeling of euphoria in the sector, which expects a very positive season, contrasts with the concern to find qualified workers to attend to this great wave of tourists. “You have to combine a high volume of work in hotels with staff disenchantment. If you combine the two things, the strategy to follow is clear: taking great care, putting people at the center and maintaining it over time”, says Marcos Valera, HR Director at Vincci Hoteles.

Thus, the famous hotel chain Vincci Hotels, has been anticipating this problem by introducing AI-based solutions and virtual assistants as a support in its onboarding processes. Vincci Hoteles has trusted HR Bot Factory per digitize your onboarding and thus reduce the impact of the first few days, improving the experience of more than 200 new additions they plan to make for the 2024 season.

Shortage of staff for the hotel sector

The shortage of qualified personnel is a reality and with increasing competition to attract talent, the difficulty of finding and retaining employees with previous training in the sector is multiplying. For this reason, it is essential, once the talent has been found, to take care of the experience of its incorporation, reducing the impact and increasing the satisfaction of new employees, which will mean an improvement in loyalty and, therefore, a reduction in turnover and the need to search for new talent.

“Hotel HR teams are facing many challenges, the first the shortage of qualified personnel and the second, the disenchantment of the staff. We are faced with the challenge of making those employees who really had a vocation for the hotel sector fall in love again, so that they want to make a career within the company.”, he explains Valera.

The key aspect in the current staffing crisis for hotels is investing in the experience of onboarding new employees, thus improving adaptation, listening to their needs and guiding them with a personalized incorporation plan.

The role of employees in the quality of hotel services

In addition, in the hotel sector, staff preparation is essential to provide exceptional service, since first-line employees are the company's visible face to customers. That is why, offering personalized onboarding to each position that allows workers to be 100% trained, is essential to ensure the best performance and the best quality in hotel services.

In this way, Vincci Hoteles's HR team can establish in advance what are the steps to follow in each of the positions, such as the necessary documentation, the training courses they must take, the internal policies they must know and the presentation of the team to which they will belong. With these instructions, a personalized chatbot is created that contacts the new addition and will help the HR team to accompany the employee.

“We have designed onboarding to embrace the employee so that at no time is anything left to chance. We have covered all the needs of an incorporation from the moment before you join the company until one year after your incorporation, so that you are always guided and have a reference so that you don't feel lost at any time” , explains Marcos Valera.

The digitalized onboarding of Vincci Hoteles

Victoria, the Vincci Hoteles chatbot that is responsible for accompanying new employees, even days before joining, welcoming them to the team and thus begins the onboarding process. In this way, Victoria ensures that employees fill out and have all the necessary documents, complete the training courses and know all the people on the team they will be part of. In addition, you will also be able to respond in real time to questions that arise to new employees throughout the process.

The introduction of a chatbot powered by Artificial Intelligence makes the process more agile and, in addition, improves the experience of the new employee who will feel more accompanied in his first steps in the company. After that, all the information about the status of the onboarding process of the new additions is collected in an ATS that human resources professionals can access to see in real time how the processes are progressing and also to receive feedback.

In this way, Vincci Hotels' Human Resources team is freed from repetitive tasks that are automated and can dedicate their time to tasks that really provide value in onboarding and that need a humanized touch. In addition, by receiving feedback from new employees, they can detect points of improvement and focus their efforts on finding solutions.

The hotel sector is already betting on artificial intelligence innovation in onboarding. Digitalization not only streamlines processes, but it also provides more personalized monitoring, improving the satisfaction of new hires and alleviating the HR workload. Thus, each addition becomes a firm step towards service excellence and talent retention.