Hotels Have a Turnover Problem. Why Should You Care?

I have planned enough events in hotels to know there is a pretty good chance the person I contract with will not be the person I work with when the event actually happens.

It has happened more times than I can count.

You spend months sourcing a hotel. You negotiate with a salesperson who knows the property inside and out. They understand your event, your priorities and all of the little reasons behind the things you negotiated. The contract gets signed, everyone is excited, and you move on to planning.

Then, somewhere along the way, you get an email.

“So-and-so is no longer with the hotel, but we're excited to introduce you to…”

If you work in events, you know the email.

Sometimes you get it more than once for the same event.

I've always known hotels have high turnover, but recently I started wondering how high it actually is—and, more importantly, why.

The answer is pretty staggering.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accommodation and food services continues to have one of the highest rates of employees voluntarily leaving their jobs in the country. In July 2026, the industry's monthly quit rate was 3.5%, compared with 2.4% across the private sector.

And hotels are still trying to recover from the staffing losses of the last several years. In a 2025 survey from the American Hotel & Lodging Association, 65% of hotels said they were experiencing staffing shortages. Hotel employment nationally was still nearly 10% below where it was before the pandemic.

At first, the reasons seem pretty obvious.

Hotels never close.

They need people at the front desk at midnight and people making breakfast at 5 a.m. They need banquet teams resetting ballrooms after a wedding while the rest of us are going to bed. Someone works Christmas morning. Someone handles the guest who is furious because their room isn't ready. Someone gets called when a toilet overflows at 2 a.m.

It's demanding work, often performed at the exact times the rest of the world doesn't want to work.

But the more I thought about it, the less satisfied I was with that explanation.

Because the turnover I see isn't only happening in hourly positions.

I see sales managers leave. Catering managers. Event managers. Directors of Events. Directors of Sales. General Managers.

These are people who have built careers in hospitality. Many of them genuinely love the industry.

So where are they going?

Interestingly, a lot of them are going to another hotel.

That is one of the things that makes hotel turnover a little more complicated than the headline number suggests. In hospitality, moving properties can be part of building a career. If you're an Event Manager and want to become a Director of Events, you could wait years for that position to open at your current hotel. Or you could take the job that just opened at the hotel across town.

Same industry. New property. Better title. Better salary.

From the employee's perspective, that can be a smart career move. From the hotel's perspective, it's turnover.

But there is another kind of turnover that concerns me more.

It's the kind that feeds itself.

A department that should have six people loses two. The hotel doesn't replace them quickly enough, so four people start doing the work of six. Emails take longer. Hours get longer. Mistakes happen. Clients become frustrated. Employees become exhausted.

Then another person leaves.

Now three people are trying to do the work of six, while simultaneously training whoever has just been hired.

Eventually, the new person walks into a department that has been underwater for months and is expected to somehow help fix it.

You don't have to be an HR expert to see how easily that becomes a cycle.

And this is the point where I think hotel turnover stops being an HR problem and becomes something the rest of us should care about.

Because if you've ever stayed at a hotel and thought, This place just doesn't feel like it used to, you may actually be noticing the effects of turnover.

If you've ever planned an event and found yourself explaining the same thing to the third person in six months, you're experiencing it.

If you've waited forever at the front desk, watched a banquet team struggle through a dinner service or encountered an employee who simply seemed exhausted, you might be experiencing it too.

Hotels sell rooms, ballrooms and restaurants, but hospitality itself is still delivered by people.

And experienced people know things.

A banquet captain who has worked in the same hotel for fifteen years knows that the ballroom technically seats 500 people, but dinner service is miserable when you put 500 people in it.

They know that one elevator gets backed up every morning.

They know that the loading dock becomes chaos when two groups load in simultaneously.

They know which chef can solve a dietary problem in five minutes and which engineer you call when something goes wrong five minutes before doors open.

They know the building in ways that don't exist in an operations manual.

That's institutional knowledge, and it's incredibly difficult to quantify until it's gone.

You can replace an employee.

You can't immediately replace ten years of experience.

That realization made me curious about the opposite side of this story.

Are there hotels where people actually stay?

There are.

Hilton's 2025 annual filing contained a statistic that stopped me: approximately 32% of its U.S. employees had been with the company for at least ten years.

Nearly one in three.

In hospitality.

That doesn't mean Hilton has magically solved turnover, and company tenure isn't the same thing as staying at one individual property. But it does challenge the idea that people simply don't stay in this industry anymore.

They clearly do.

I've seen the same thing on a much smaller scale when I walk into certain hotels.

Every once in a while, I'll work with a property where the banquet captain has been there for 18 years. The Director of Events has been there for eight. Someone at the front desk started there a decade ago and has worked their way through three different departments.

You can almost feel the difference.

People know each other. They know the building. They anticipate problems instead of simply reacting to them. There is a kind of rhythm that develops when people have worked alongside one another for years.

And that's when my research question changed.

I started out wondering why hotels have such terrible turnover.

Now I'm much more interested in why certain hotels don't.

I also don't think the answer is as simple as Marriott versus Hilton versus Hyatt.

Something most hotel guests don't realize is that the name on the building doesn't necessarily tell you who runs it. A hotel may carry the flag of a major brand, be owned by another company and be operated by a completely separate management company.

So two hotels with the exact same logo on the front of the building can have completely different leadership teams, cultures, staffing philosophies and employee experiences.

Which means maybe we've been looking at hotel quality in the wrong way.

We have ratings for almost everything else.

We know how many stars a hotel has. We know whether it has a spa. We know the thread count of the sheets and how many square feet are in the ballroom. We read hundreds of guest reviews before booking a vacation.

But imagine if, alongside all of that, a hotel told you:

Our General Manager has been here for 11 years.

Our Director of Events has been here for nine.

Half of our managers were promoted from within.

Our average banquet employee has been here for seven years.

I'd pay attention to that.

Because I think it would tell me something about the hotel that a five-star rating couldn't.

It would tell me how the place treats the people who are responsible for treating me well.

And maybe that's the bigger lesson buried underneath all of these turnover statistics.

We spend a tremendous amount of money trying to improve customer experience. Hotels renovate lobbies, replace furniture, introduce new technology, redesign restaurants and spend millions of dollars making properties more beautiful.

Those things matter.

But I've never walked away from a hotel thinking, That carpet really took care of me.

I remember the person who did.

Maybe one of the best investments a hospitality company can make isn't another guest-facing amenity.

Maybe it's becoming the kind of place where great people want to stay.

Because before you can create a hotel people want to come back to, you probably have to create a hotel where the people taking care of them want to come back tomorrow.