Long lines, fast food closures: Hilton Head’s summer tourism boom meets labor shortage
A Hilton Head Island resident craving a chicken sandwich after sunset and a tourist coming in town for a vacation have something in common.
In recent weeks, they’ve both been disappointed.
As high tourism season ramps up on the island, the side effects of a workforce shortage are difficult to ignore. Island visitors and residents have noticed restaurants closing their doors early and unpreparedness that affects the start of their vacations.
“We are SO SORRY to close our store early. We don’t have enough people to work the next shift,” a sign taped to a traffic cone read at Zaxby’s restaurant on Hilton Head’s south end read in early June.
On Memorial Day weekend, a shortage of cleaning staff meant that some rental homes managed by Beach Properties weren’t ready for check-in until 7 p.m., three hours after the typical check-in time, general manager Ed Bray told The Island Packet.
On an island that relies on thousands of employees to handle an influx of summer tourism, looking at summer 2021 on Hilton Head is starting to feel like peering over the edge of cliff, according to island employees already stretched thin.
The workforce shortage being felt around the country is compounded on Hilton Head due to the shortage of affordable housing and a wave of tourism that requires more servers, cleaning staff, tour guides and chefs.
Hilton Head restaurant jobs
Island restaurants that typically double their serving staff for the summer season are advertising jobs well into June.
As of June 15, the Southeast Entertainment Restaurant Group was hiring for 120 positions throughout its 12 restaurant concepts on Hilton Head and in Bluffton, according to its website.
Other restaurant groups have taken directly to social media to attract potential applicants.
“Calling all high volume bartenders! The summer season is officially here and we need you!” The Coastal Restaurants and Bars group posted to Facebook.
Meanwhile, restaurant staff report working double shifts multiple days per week in order to keep up with the demand for dining. Wait times at popular restaurants are reaching past two hours on weekdays.
The industries that support hospitality workers are feeling the strain, too.
The Children’s Center, which started a Saturday childcare program this summer, is facing staffing shortages that affect others’ ability to go to work.
“We have 50 children on a waitlist right now, and if I had enough staff I could bring them on, but we don’t have the staff to do that,” Executive Director Jody Levitt told The Island Packet. “We’re not immune to what pretty much every business on the island is going through.”
Levitt said the hiring crunch is “especially bad” this year.
Typically by early summer, she said the center has multiple resumes submitted by potential candidates for childcare positions.
“Now it’s nothing. It’s not even a trickle. It’s a drought,” she said of hiring this year.
What causes the labor shortage?
National economic policy groups offer many reasons for isolated staffing shortages, which are being felt especially hard by the hospitality and leisure industries.
“It’s not just low wages dragging on the labor market’s recovery. UBS says childcare and COVID-19 fears from older people are more to blame for labor shortages than enhanced unemployment,” Business Insider reported in a May 30 article.
Unfortunately, Hilton Head’s economy sits squarely in the leisure and travel sectors that were dormant through parts of 2020 due to the pandemic, so the roaring return to travel has left employees and their employers flat-footed.
At The Holiday Inn Beach House Resort in the Coligny area, beachgoers were frustrated by wedding chairs and other furniture left out on the beach for three days following a ceremony in late May.
Lisa Stackhouse, the director of marketing at the resort, told The Island Packet that the wedding setup wasn’t taken down the night of the event because the resort was low on staff and didn’t have enough people to schedule for the event.
“Normally we’re running 120 employees this time of year. Right now we have 70,” she said. The resort doesn’t have a dedicated banquet staff this year, either, she added.
Stackhouse apologized for the incident and said the resort has been selling out at unprecedented levels in 2021.
“We can’t keep up with the demand. We are busier than ever,” she said.
The higher-than-normal demand for hotels and rentals strains every part of the tourist’s experience, even those that are set into motion before they step foot on the island.
Bray, of Beach Properties, said two of the 30 cleaning companies that he contracts with to turn 420 rentals each week have canceled on Thursday because staff isn’t available for Saturday cleaning shifts.
In a year marked by an industry that’s been nearly impossible to predict, Bray and other short-term rental company employees can only hope for the best.
“It’s certainly one way to kick off the summer,” he joked. “It’s only going to get better.”
This story was originally published June 15, 2021 at 10:11 AM.
