Maids and housekeepers at luxury hotels: life stories in hotels of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

The tourism industry evinces a high turnover of staff which needs further hard training and organisation. Broadly speaking, the service quality seems to be directly proportional to excessive working hours, which are accompanied by less-paid wages and hard working conditions. This paper interrogates furtherly on the (real) motivations of maid and housekeepers who are professionally educated to serve high purchasing power tourists. The research focuses on the needs, socio-economic background of maid and housekeepers as well as the pro and cons of their daily tasks. Based on the life story and story-telling and as the main method of study, we conduct exploratory research -sampled by 8 in-depth interviews-. The research takes place -following the snowball technique- in luxury hotels geographically situated in Buenos Aires city in the second semester of 2019. The current investigation aims at discussing the interconnection of individual contexts with the labour relations in the industry of tourism and hospitality.