As rides and attractions team leader at Chessington World of Adventures Resort, Sam Gadd says his job is to ensure the thousands of visitors who flood through the theme park’s gates this time of year have “the best day”.
But the peak period “can be stressful guest-wise”, he says. With higher gate figures than usual, “they’ll have to queue up for longer times, they won’t be able to get on as many rides . . . They’ll probably leave a bit more dissatisfied.”
Around 60 per cent of Merlin’s annual visitors come to its parks during the six weeks from late July to the end of August. The sudden surge of visitors leads to one of the leisure industry’s biggest recruitment challenges: how to significantly scale up hiring for the busy summer period.
Nearly 1,000 seasonal staff — mostly students — work at Chessington in south-east England in the high season, accounting for more than 80 per cent of its workers. Chessington’s owner Merlin Entertainments, which also runs Alton Towers, Thorpe Park and Legoland, has to battle with other hospitality businesses and retailers to meet the sudden demand.
Since Covid, competition for staff in hospitality has been particularly intense.
Soon after Merlin’s parks reopened following pandemic lockdowns, “we struggled to recruit at that point, because people, all of a sudden, were seeing lots of jobs in ecommerce and supermarkets as a safer job,” says Mike Vallis, managing director of resort theme parks at Merlin.
One crucial objective is persuading seasonal workers to return year after year.
“We realised we’ve really got to engage better with our staff to make them want to come and work for us,” instead of Tesco or Amazon, says Vallis. He and other managers frequently visit each theme park and have made tweaks, such as changes to uniforms, following staff requests. Merlin also offers a popular benefit: “What everybody loves is [that] we provide them free tickets to our attractions” after a three-week probation, he adds.
Gadd, who started as a seasonal worker in 2021 before taking a permanent management position, says colleagues are “like one big family, and they motivate you to come back” by spending time together.
Merlin must also be competitive on pay, which has been a growing problem in recent years. “[We] always try to be ahead of the national minimum wage and the national living wage”, says Vallis.
Merlin’s return rate of seasonal workers has improved, from pre-Covid’s 20 per cent to more than 30 per cent, filling 5,000 jobs, half of its UK workforce. Most of these workers are under 25 and many joined the company at 16 or 17. Many are university students who live locally with their parents, so Brexit had little impact, according to Vallis.
Vallis, who started as a seasonal trainee engineer at Thorpe Park nearly 40 years ago, says Merlin is a “very good first job portal” for those interested in the hospitality industry and that drives people back the following year.
Through weeks of training, “we give people who have their very first job the skills straight away,” be it customer service, operating rides or cleaning, followed by ways to step up their responsibilities, including leadership training. “We can be that first job, and it can inspire people to consider hospitality as a career . . . They can use the skills that we’ll give them elsewhere,” Vallis adds.
Merlin typically starts writing to summer workers in November, asking whether they would want to come back. It maps out its returners with their desired time period and the number of staff needed at each park and starts recruiting in January.
The company participates in open days and career fairs at UK universities and the government’s portal for job seekers. As its return rate increases, more workers refer friends and family.
Introducing friends to the job is also one of the largest contributors to recruitment for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which hires 1,600 seasonal lifeguards each year, to serve from Easter until October.
Existing workers at the charity, who carried out almost 3mn preventive actions in 2023 across the UK and Channel Islands, “are the best promoters of working as a lifeguard”, says Lee Fisher, lifeguard experience manager at the RNLI.
“We compete against the hospitality and retail [industries],” he says. “A lot of our lifeguards are students, and they would be coming out to [work] for a hotel, a bar or a café.”
Ali Setterfield, a 20-year-old university student studying international business, has long been a passionate swimmer and is in his second year as a seasonal lifeguard at RNLI.
He admits it is a tough job — lifeguards must pass a fitness test, which requires a timed swim and he could sometimes be one of only five looking after 10,000 beachgoers in Margate — but, he says: “You’re doing something good, and when you save people, you’ve actually had a good impact on the world.”
