The troubling labor issue

I read a great note yesterday morning from Patrick Scholes, analyst with Truist Securities, about the emerging elephant in the room – the industry’s inability to staff up on the line level as demand starts to return in the U.S. After too many years of too often not treating line level staff with enough respect, the pandemic has served to hasten their return. Offering higher wages is not necessarily the easy solution, and the impact would likely negate profitability gains. Scholes wrote that higher wages could outweigh post-COVID operating efficiencies in hotels (>100-300 bps margin hit). Of course, wages are…