Excelsior lays off 80 staff as profits fall
The Excelsior hotel has laid off 80 workers - a tenth of its staff - after competition on room rates forced profits down.
The cuts at the Causeway Bay hotel followed a 20 per cent drop in revenue for the first four months of the year, general manager Peter Lowe said, although the hotel's 80 per cent occupancy rate remains one of the SAR's highest.
Redundancies across the workforce from cleaners to top management were effective immediately. There are 720 staff remaining.
The Excelsior is the latest hotel to be hit by the Asian financial crisis and tourism downturn.
In March, the Regal chain sacked 126 workers and there were staff cuts at other hotels including the Grand Hyatt in Wan Chai, Tsim Sha Tsui's Holiday Inn Golden Mile and Grand Stanford Harbour View and The Excelsior's sister, the Mandarin Oriental in Central. Plans for 11 new hotels have been scrapped and the International Hotel was forced to close in March.
Hotel problems, with occupancy rates falling to 70 per cent in the first three months of this year from 88 per cent in 1996, have contributed to the 3.9 per cent jobless rate, a 14-year high.
The Excelsior's profits have been hit by cut-throat competition in room rates and also by a fall in use of other services such as limousine airport transfers and meals in the hotel, said Jill Kluge, communications director of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group.
However, the move was denounced as a mere money-saving exercise by the chief executive of the Confederation of Trade Unions, Elizabeth Tang Yin-ngor, who said hotels had had it too good for too long. 'What is mystifying is that these big employers are not really facing serious financial difficulties but are retrenching workers merely because they are earning less now,' she said.
