Hard, hard… The health crisis accentuated the recruitment difficulties of the tourism sector, without sparing that of business travel. An observation shared by the speakers of a workshop organized by the AFTM during the IFTM Top Resa show.
“It’s very complicated to recruit ticket advisers. At the end of June, on the Apec site, there were 1,000 job offers for business travel agents. It’s a lot ! The business travel industry is complex, misunderstood,” notes Matthieu Champion, senior sales director at Egencia.
“All companies recruit at the same time and in large volumes. There has been a bottleneck since the post covid-19 recovery. The market is tense, because there are not enough people referred to business travel”analyzes Caroline Noizet, human resources director of FCM Travel France.
The sector suffers from an image deficit according to Julien Chambert, founder of the consulting firm CBT Conseil: « Between leisure and business, the professions and requirements are very different and continue to evolve without anything to do with mobility. It’s a hyper-tech industry. »
For Patricia Morosini, business travel director at Selectour, it is urgent to enhance the value of business travel professions. Especially since the evil is not new.
“The devaluation of the profession of business advisor is linked to the arrival of technology on the client side. Some wondered if they had a future. It also comes from the mode of remuneration of the agency, the transaction. When the price drops, the business agents see it as a degradation of their profession. While we ask them a lot of technical knowledge despite the arrival of techno. During the crisis they were essential. The vagaries of business travel are constant”she pleads
This summer, Florent Martin, founder and CEO of the Easy2call call center, recruited 35 people, including 20 junior counselors currently in training, due to a lack of trained and experienced staff.
” There are a severe lack of people in the market. We have benefited from this pool of retrainers and are organizing their training,” he specifies.
“All tourism stakeholders are affected by the shortage. In France, all trades combined, 520,000 people quit their job by quarter. A large majority of CDIs. It’s something that didn’t exist a few years ago.”, observes Georges Rudas, president of the French Institute of Tourism (IFT). As a reminder, two million jobs are to be filled in France in the hotel/restaurant industry.