Hotels; catering; tourism and Employment

Tourism

Tourism in a narrow sense is the sector of travel-related activities: travel agencies, tour operating, tourist guiding and related activities. The ILO definition of the HCT sector includes not only the services provided to travellers but also those for residents. The tourism ratio of the turnover of hotels and restaurants, i.e. the proportion of their services provided to travellers, may range from one quarter to three quarters. Still, it is standard language to subsume the whole sector under "tourism".

Other activities in tourism are more difficult to define and are little represented at the institutional or associative level. As an example, communities in tourism destinations are very active in marketing as well as in running local public facilities for tourists. These activities are not properly covered by tourism statistics where they are called "collective tourism consumption", but they are very important for community strategies such as sustainable tourism development.

Companies active in the travel and tourism sector have been strongly affected by the rapid and significant introduction of new technologies of information and communication. The nature, content and number of jobs in tourism-related activities have therefore changed drastically. For example, online-booking accounts for 20 per cent of travel booking in Europe.

Issues and trends in tourism

As mentioned earlier tourism is growing substantially from year to year despite significant downturns from time to time, followed by quick recovery. Job creation is unquestioned in the sector. This makes it an ideal candidate for addressing employment and development challenges such as gender promotion, youth employment, migrant labour and child labour – all of which are at the heart of the ILO's decent work agenda. The sector is also faced with problems related to the high rate of undesired part-time, temporary or casual and seasonal employment, the high and increasing rate of subcontracting and outsourcing with its potential implications for working conditions and low union density.

In 2005-08, the ILO Portugal Office provided assistance to an EQUAL project called Revalorize Work to Promote Gender Equality in Portugal. A tripartite group developed a job evaluation method for the restaurant and beverage sectors where women predominate but do the jobs that are least well paid and least valued, including by the women themselves. The project seeks to redress the imbalance in particular occupations through the development of job evaluation methods that are free from gender bias; to modernize the sectors’ occupational classification systems; and to establish remuneration systems based on transparent and gender-neutral criteria and procedures, in accordance with ILO Convention 100.

Working paper

• Reducing poverty through tourism (pdf, 890k). Also available in Spanish (Reducir la pobreza a través del turismo, pdf, 640k)

Issues Briefs

• Tourism and development (pdf, 88k)
• Gender (pdf, 77k)
• Private Equity and REITs (pdf, 63k)
• Globalisation, new trends and challenges (pdf, 84k)

Useful links/ resources

• Tourism Labour Standards and their Contribution to Gender Equality (MS Powerpoint, 87k)