The millionaire owner of a luxury Art Deco island hotel in Devon has revealed he's been forced to wash the pots in the kitchen himself - because of ongoing staff shortages in the hospitality industry.
Giles Fuchs, 56, owns a 70 percent share of the Burgh Island Hotel, which he helped buy for £8.5million three years ago, but says his business has been hit by former staff finding jobs elsewhere while on furlough during the pandemic, DailyMail reports.
The last two weekends have seen a return to pre-pandemic levels of guests visiting the South Devon island, with not enough staff to attend to them.
The trade organization UK Hospitality reported this week a shortfall of 188,000 staff in the hotel industry caused by the pandemic - with many foreign workers returning to their home countries and furloughed staff finding new jobs.
The hotel, which dates back to 1929, is already booked up until November and Mr Fuchs said he's been so desperate not to let standards slip after re-opening that he's reached for the fairy liquid and rolled his sleeves up.
The hospitality industry is in for a bumper summer but business owners say they're struggling without pre-Covid employee numbers.
More than half of pub and bar workers were still on furlough at the start of May despite a third of bars warning they did not have enough staff to cope with the easing of lockdown, it was revealed yesterday.
Numbers published by the Office for National Statistics showed 55 per cent of hospitality staff were on furlough at the start of last month.
That figure is way down on the 91 percent recorded during the November 2020 lockdown peak but it is still far higher than furlough levels in the wider economy.
