A new challenge for the tourism industry: accessible housing for workers

Hello everyone!

A few weeks ago I wrote an article and today I want to talk about a related topic: the shortage of skilled labor in tourism. I commented on the sector facing the challenge of recovering thousands of workers after the pandemic, who changed their professional careers on other industries after trying to recuperate.

This issue has dragged other problematics this last year, one of them being the shortage of affordable and accessible housing for workers in the tourism industry.

This phenomenon is occurring more and more every time in the Puerto Vallarta and Bahía de Banderas region where large hotels are constantly built and need to bring people from different states of the country, who need a place to live and can’t find one, or if they do, it is in places very far from their workplaces.

I’ve detected several factors as triggers for this situation, one of them being the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the Mexican Real Estate Bank, the industrial and vacation home segments registered more dynamism, while the commercial and residential housing segments showed the slowest progress, with no opportunities to growth in 2021.

Fun fact, rented houses at an affordable price in neighborhoods near the hotel complexes are good tourist market, today we see that they are being offered on different platforms of accommodation as a vacation home. In Bahía de Banderas, an “expulsion effect” has occurred, the owners of the houses prefer to rent them to tourists, while the locals are unable to pay rents over 700 dollars.

Since the housing crisis is so complicated investors are considering the possibility of building villages, with “tiny houses”, although they will be small, they will have everything they need at hand and workers can live and be close to tourist developments.

One of tourism’s goals is to improve communities and all of those who make a living from it, but tourism isn’t being helpful if workers do not have access to decent housing or if they have to travel between two and three hours every day to get to their jobs, then it is not helping to improve their quality of life.

With the construction of new developments is still at the door, with thousands of rooms, both in Puerto Vallarta and in Bahía de Banderas, Private Initiative and the governments need to pay attention to this problem since they will create more jobs but they will also require more housing for workers, schools and other services, such as water, electricity, sanitation, etc., and we are not ready to face the challenge.

What do you think? I’ll be reading your comments.