Industry Overview
The enormous hospitality & leisure sector actually encompasses a number of industries that together employ more than 10% of the UK's entire workforce.
While the majority of businesses within H&L remain in private hands, with only 30% of hotels for example being corporately owned, the corporate sector still occupies the bulk of the market and is the principal employer.
Hospitality & leisure breaks down into six broad sectors:
- Hotels
- Restaurants
- Contract catering operators
- Non-contract catering operators
- Retail - high street / in-store
- Bars
- In-flight / terminus
- Events - leisure/sport
- Private members clubs
- Pubs & breweries
- Leisure
- Health and fitness clubs
- Sports clubs
- Entertainment - cinemas / bingo etc.
- Holiday parks
- Caravan and camping
- Visitor attractions
As you can imagine the range of career opportunities across such diverse vocations is vast. While it is impossible to overly generalise the sort of people who tend to thrive in H&L sector, one common factor is the ability to work well in a customer facing environment. As a result there are many synergies with and transferable skills from the retail industry.