German tourist industry hits 'rocky road' hiring new migrants

Burkhard Scholz, the manager of a four-star hotel on the wooded shore of a lake near Berlin, had 10 trainee jobs up for grabs last year. But he only found two people to fill them, one of whom was an asylum seeker from Afghanistan.

"In Germany we can't find any young people who want to do this extremely demanding trainee programme... You have to work in the evenings and sometimes at night as there are guests around the clock, and that's a big hurdle for German applicants," he told Reuters at the world's biggest travel fair, the ITB in Berlin.

Like other hotel bosses, Scholz sees the 1.1 million migrants who arrived in Germany last year as potential candidates for trainee schemes he offers in cooking, hotel work and event management.

But integrating migrants via work is a "rocky road" cluttered with cultural issues, he said, including some migrants' aversion to working with women. Two Muslim migrants from Somalia and Eritrea had proved unsuitable during work experience in his hotel restaurant.

"After a few days I noticed they were giving trays to a German employee and saying: 'You take it.' So I asked them why and it turned out they couldn't touch alcohol for religious reasons, so it was a big problem," Scholz said.

His experience with migrant workers illustrates both the opportunity and the challenge facing Europe's largest economy. Germany urgently needs new workers as its population ages but it is struggling to cope with the massive influx of newcomers.