Waiters in Short Supply
Source: Louis Hansel en Unsplash ‘A certain stigma’: Spain’s hospitality sector hit by waiter shortage Despite huge national unemployment, restaurants owners are struggling to fill vacancies. Why? After a two-year drought, tourists are flooding back to Spain, but just as the hospitality industry begins to recover from the pandemic, it faces a new crisis – a shortage of waiters. From Mallorca to Madrid, restaurateurs are crying out for waiters with tens of thousands of jobs waiting to be filled. The Hard Rock hotel in Ibiza is so desperate it is offering staff a €200 (£170) bonus to find suitable employees. The paradox is that unemployment in Spain is running at 13.4% – more than double the EU average of 6.2% – yet there are more than 100,000 job vacancies, with as many as half of those in hospitality, even though the national statistics office says 85,000 bars and restaurants closed permanently in the first year of the pandemic. “People come to me for interviews and they say: