Calling cooks and cleaners: Greece tourism hit by staff shortages

Calling cooks and cleaners: Greece tourism hit by staff shortages

Chryssa Vertakis’s three-star Crete hotel is nearly booked up this summer, but her guests will have to eat elsewhere because her kitchen has no chef, and no cooks. Like hotel owners across the country, she’s facing acute staff shortages after two years of pandemic restrictions that have seen droves of hospitality workers seek work elsewhere. The key industry-which provides a quarter of Greece’s national income-relies largely on foreign staff to work as waiters, cleaners, busboys and cooks.

Many Bulgarians working as cleaners in Vertakis’s hotel Alexia Beach went home during last year’s lockdown, and did not return, she told AFP. Greeks have also sought jobs in other sectors in response to COVID-shortened seasons that compounded long-existing grievances over working hours and low pay. “Seasonal employees cannot support their families on three and four months of work (per year),” Nikos Kokolakis, chairman of hotel workers in Crete’s capital Iraklio, told state TV ERT on Wednesday. The union of Greek restaurant workers also says it’s no surprise eligible workers steer clear of an industry where some operators “demand 10 to 12 hours of work without a day off, offering barely 700 euros ($740) per month.”

‘Quality tourism in danger’

Andreas Andreadis, honorary chairman of the