Seasonal adjustment of employment to demand and revenues in tourist hotels during expansion and stagnation

The monthly distribution of employment in hotels is, presumably, strongly related to demand for hotel services and to the derived revenue. Analysis of the monthly distributions of these indicators at tourism hotels in Israel during the years 1992-1997 revealed two types of maladjustment. First, the amplitude of the distribution for bed-nights and revenues is much higher than the counterpart distribution for employment. Second, the distributions differ in their measure of skewness. While the employment distribution is negatively skewed towards the autumn months, the distributions of the revenues and more so that of the demand for bed-nights services, are positively skewed towards the spring. Hotel management seems to be more alert to reducing the employment maladjustment during years of stagnation than years of expansion. Several hypotheses are suggested in order to explain the maladjustment. A part of it is probably associated with the allocation of overtime working hours. Another portion seems to be related to the efforts made by hotel management to retain trained workers year round in return for their consent to work for low pay.