Hotels, restaurants and other travel-related businesses are adding more positions, attracting people like Matthew Bryant, a hospitality studies student at the Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University.
“The hospitality industry is beginning to recover, and I decided to switch careers because I saw a professional future in it,” said Mr. Bryant, 26, who worked for five years as a federal government consultant in Washington after college. “I wanted to combine the skills I had learned as a consultant in a customer service industry, and this seemed a great fit.”
While job recovery nationally has been lagging, the travel industry has been faring much better. About 8 percent, or 7,000, of the total of 88,000 jobs added by employers in March were in the travel industry, according to the U.S. Travel Association, a trade group.
The growth is being spurred, in part, by a modest rise in business travel spending. As the economy improves, such spending is predicted to climb 5.1 percent this year, to $268.5 billion, according to the Global Business Travel Association, a trade group. Its forecast, released in April, is up substantially from the 1.8 percent rise in industry spending in 2012, and higher than the group’s previous prediction for growth of 4.6 percent.
“Companies feel the need to compete, and the global economy is driving companies to invest in business travel,” said Michael W. McCormick, the association’s executive director.
Shored up by strong corporate profits, companies are sending more employees to conventions, meetings and industry events — gatherings that were more strictly circumscribed when the economy sank.
“Events are being planned farther in advance,” said Eric Eden, vice president for marketing at Cvent, a meeting and event management technology company. “And there are more national meetings instead of small, regional ones, and higher numbers of people attending each event.”
As a result, hotels are seeing more bookings for meetings, and rates are increasing, he said. Spending on group events, Mr. Eden added, is expected to increase 6 percent this year, to almost $116 million, compared with an earlier prediction of 5.2 percent growth in 2013.
And hotel occupancy rates are moving up steadily, said Jan Freitag, senior vice president for global development at Smith Travel Research, which tracks the hotel industry.
“Occupancy rates, which are a bellwether for business travel, rose over the last three years to 64.3 percent,” he said.
Over all, about 7.7 million people worked in the travel sector, according to figures for the last three months of 2012 provided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, part of the Commerce Department. Although spending declined in air and other transportation, outlays rose for traveler accommodation and for food services and drinking places, by 9.4 percent and 8.6 percent respectively, according to the federal figures released in March.
The data covers a range of jobs, from the minimum-wage, no-benefit slots to well-paid hotel analyst positions, but some 53 percent of travel industry workers are paid $25,000 to $69,000, according to a U.S. Travel Association analysis of the federal jobs data done in conjunction with Oxford Economics, an economics forecasting firm.
According to the analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the travel industry is one of the top 10 largest employers of middle-class wage earners, with a maximum average salary of $81,900. Two of every five workers who start their careers in the travel industry go on to earn more than $100,000 a year, according to the association analysis.
Those prospects persuaded Mr. Bryant to enroll in hospitality studies. After graduating with a political science degree in 2008 from American University, Mr. Bryant landed a job at a management consulting firm. But after five years, he said, “I wanted a change and be involved in a customer service industry.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/business/rising-travel-industry-attracts-young-careerists.html?partner=rss&emc=rss