While expats hold 90% of the general manager positions in the four and five-star hotels in Bucharest, increasingly more Romanians are becoming part of middle-management teams.
"I think it is time we had confidence in Romanianse skills and kept those who have potential inside the country, instead of watching them go elsewhere," says Pierre Boissel, the new general manager of Ana Hotels, who took up his position in January.
The Ana Hotelse management intends to replace the foreign manager of the four-star hotel Europa, based in Eforie Nord, with a Romanian manager.
For a long time the domestic hotel industry has been a sector mainly controlled by expats. An explanation for this trend in employment lies in the fact that most of the four and five-star hotels in Romania are either investments made by international chains or are affiliated to certain hotel chains or, at the very least, are under a management contract with respected international chains.
The international chains have preferred appointing foreigners to the position of general manager in their hotels, because they have international experience, as well as a better knowledge of the organisational and corporate structure. At the same time, most of the hotel chains would rather move around the employees within the organisation than hire new people.
"The advantage when you hire an expat is that you sign a two or three-year contract and you are sure that they will not leave within this period of time. When you hire a Romanian manager, you cannot be sure that they will remain in this position as long, because increasingly more companies entering the market are ready to pay 500 or 1,000 euros more and therefore the managers are tempted to leave," says Bruno Vinette, general manager of the four-star hotel Sofitel, which has a management contract signed with Accor.
At the middle-management level, things are slightly different - while foreigners initially held the most important middle-management positions in hotels, Romanians have now replaced them as their contracts expired.
"We had four expats in 2005 and now there are only two. Our French chef, who was transferred to Novotel, has been replaced with a Romanian chef and we have registered extremely positive results. He is the first Romanian chef in the Sofitel network. Also, another Romanian citizen has replaced an expat in the position of sales manager," says Vinette.
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