Staffing Struggles: Prague’s Hospitality Sector Faces Critical Employee Shortages

Article submitted by Lucia Brozmannová, Patricia Cîrtog, Bálint Dömötör, Szuszan Stepanyan

Hotels, restaurants and pubs in Central Europe’s most popular tourist destination are crying out for waiters, chefs, bartenders and kitchen staff in a labor crisis.

Nearly one-third of the positions are vacant at the height of the tourist season in Prague.

“Month to month, we are hiring everyone we can find”, Michael Sito, the manager of The Globe Bookstore and Cafe says. “Since Covid, there has been a huge shortage of employees in this sector. So we have been constantly hiring for the last two and a half years”.

Nela is a 21-year-old waitress at one of the most frequented parts of the Czech capital. She is unskilled and only works part-time, still she is irreplaceable for JK Gastro House, a fancy restaurant and bar close to Wenceslas Square. “If I go home to Ostrava, the restaurant would shut down”, she says. Since she started working at the restaurant 18 months ago, almost the whole staff have been replaced.

The situation is very similar at other restaurants. “A lot of people working here are students who don’t speak Czech and they work a part-time job”, Michael Sito says.

“Every week new people start working here, then they just leave”, Monib says, who works at a Turkish restaurant near the National Museum. There are a lot of jobs and not enough people. “You can easily find a job anywhere in Prague”, he continues.

90.000 people out of a total of 270.000 positions are missing from the hospitality sector in the Czech Republic, according to HOTREC, the umbrella association of Hotels, Restaurants, Pubs and Cafes in Europe. The country has the lowest unemployment rate in the European Union.

“A huge number of workers left the hospitality industry during Covid and they did not return”, Michael Marek who runs Bauer Hotel Group says. He has been forced to raise salaries by at least 15 per cent to be able to attract new workforce, because of the shortage of people willing to work in the industry.

To solve the crisis, restaurant managers have turned to immigrants for help. “Thank God for the foreigners!” Marek says. About half of his employees are immigrants, many from Ukraine who arrived after the war.

However, Alina, a 26-year-old Ukrainian waitress working in a pizzeria in the city center thinks that salaries are still too low. “There is a wide selection of jobs, but not all of the jobs are well paid.”

“Covid really pushed many people out of the sector”, Sito says. “I think they are scared to come back, because this sector was hit the hardest – we were forced to close for so long and we couldn’t support the employees and their families”.