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How Leading Hospitality Brands are Building Connected Cultures That Keep Workers from Walking Away

By Louise Willoughby-Petit Chief People Officer, LumApps | January 2026

According to the World Travel & Tourism Council’s thought leadership report, “Future of the Travel & Tourism Workforce, ” the hospitality industry will be short 8.6 million workers by 2035. Unfortunately, hospitality won’t be the only one hit. The broader travel and tourism sector faces a 43 million worker gap globally, even as it creates 91 million new jobs over the next decade.

Those 91 million new jobs should solve the problem. Instead, demand for workers will still outpace supply, which shows that the issue isn’t rooted in a lack of job opportunities. The industry is having trouble keeping the workers it hires.

Although hospitality turnover fell from 52% to 45% in 2024, Beekeeper’s 2025 Frontline Workforce Report found that nearly half the workforce still walks out the door each year. And the financial impacts can especially take a toll on businesses. One estimate found that replacing a single hourly worker could cost close to $4,700. Multiply that across an entire hotel or restaurant chain, and the financial toll becomes staggering.

Most operators respond by raising wages, adding benefits, or offering signing bonuses. These help, but they miss what actually drives people away. Workers leave when they feel disconnected from leadership, unclear about expectations, and invisible to the organization. They leave when communication breaks down.

The hospitality brands that retain talent have figured out something their competitors haven’t. Communication isn’t a soft skill you can delegate to HR. It’s the infrastructure that determines whether your culture works at all. When you build systems that connect every worker to information, feedback, and each other, people stop looking for the exit.

Why Traditional Retention Strategies Miss the Mark

Better pay and benefits matter. A housekeeper balancing rising costs needs fair pay. A server juggling two jobs needs predictable hours. But compensation alone won’t retain someone who feels disconnected from the work and the team around them.

Beekeeper’s report showed that unclear priorities and insufficient leadership support prevent nearly a third of managers from doing their jobs well. If your managers don’t know what leadership expects or how to get the support they need, how can they create stable teams? Then that confusion flows downward, with frontline workers ending up with contradictory instructions, last-minute changes, and no explanation for why decisions get made.

In small companies, culture happens naturally. Everyone knows each other. Information flows easily. You can walk down the hall to ask the CEO a question. But once you grow past a certain size, that organic connection disappears. You need deliberate systems to replace what proximity used to provide.

Hospitality faces an additional challenge. Front-office teams work in corporate environments with email, Slack, regular meetings, and direct access to leadership. Frontline workers operate in a different world. They’re on their feet during shifts, moving between tasks, often without a desk or computer. This creates two separate employee experiences within the same company. Office staff feel informed and included. Frontline staff feel like they work for a different organization entirely. Bridging that divide is where the retention opportunity lies.

Workers want to be heard. They want to understand how their work contributes to something larger than cleaning a room or serving a meal. Without systems that create these connections, frontline teams work in isolation.

Communication as Cultural Infrastructure

The best hospitality operators treat communication systems the same way they treat scheduling software or point-of-sale technology. You wouldn’t run a hotel without a way to manage shifts or process transactions. Culture requires the same intentional infrastructure.

This means creating real-time feedback loops where managers actually respond. Not annual surveys that disappear into HR. Not suggestion boxes that no one checks. Employees need to see that their input reaches someone who can act on it, and that action happens in a timeframe they can observe.

Recognition needs to work the same way. When a front desk agent handles a difficult guest interaction well, their manager should be able to acknowledge it immediately, not wait for a quarterly review. Or when a co-worker completes a task ahead of schedule, the team should hear about it that day.

At one organization I worked with, employees used pulse surveys to request more volunteer opportunities. Leadership added volunteer days to the benefits package and told everyone this came directly from their feedback. That visible connection between speaking up and seeing change matters more than the benefit itself. It shows people their voice has weight.

Office workers can walk down the hall when they have a question or want to share an idea. Frontline workers need mobile-first systems that work the same way. They need to access information, give feedback, and connect with their team from wherever they are, during breaks between tasks or at the start of a shift.

When these systems work, they break down the barriers between corporate offices and frontline operations. Everyone works from the same information, building mutual understanding across roles.

One hospitality brand launched an internal academy offering courses from high school diplomas to bachelor’s degrees, with full tuition coverage upfront. Employees in that program stayed 20% longer than those who didn’t participate. Nearly 90% said it strengthened their belief that the company cared about their growth. The program was so successful because it shared a clear message that their employees matter enough to invest in.

What Connected Culture Actually Looks Like in Hospitality Operations

Connected culture means information flows to everyone at once, not through a game of telephone that reaches frontline staff last. When leadership decides to implement new sustainability protocols, staff understand why these changes matter and how they fit into larger goals. They’re not just following orders.

Shift handovers become knowledge transfers instead of lost information. When an experienced server leaves, their insights about difficult tables or kitchen timing don’t walk out with them. Teams capture what works and pass it forward.

The mechanics matter. Some brands use bi-weekly pulse surveys with ten questions that feed into manager dashboards. Managers see team sentiment in real time instead of waiting for annual engagement scores. Other companies create anonymous feedback channels that require a manager’s response within 48 hours. The accountability matters as much as the channel itself.

Mobile-first platforms meet workers where they already are. Someone can check their schedule, submit time off, or flag a problem from their phone between tasks. Onboarding connects new hires to purpose before procedures, so they can learn why the work matters before they start their first day.

I’ve seen the difference visible leadership makes. At one operation, frontline staff talked unprompted about their site manager. He understood their daily challenges because he was present for them. When they raised concerns, he made changes they could see. They spoke about him with genuine pride. That pride extended to their work.

In hospitality, speaking up affects more than morale. When staff flag maintenance issues before guests complain, or suggest better check-in processes, service quality improves. Problems get solved faster, and good ideas reach decision-makers in a timely fashion.

How to Build Your Own Connected Culture

The path from recognizing communication gaps to closing them requires specific choices about systems, accountability, and what you measure. Hotels and restaurants that have made this shift share common practices worth replicating.

Start by finding the gaps. Where do frontline workers feel cut off from decision-making? Where do managers guess at team sentiment instead of knowing it? These gaps show you where to focus first. From there, the practical work begins:

Choose platforms that match how your teams actually work. If your staff spend their shifts on their feet, they need mobile-first tools they can access during breaks. Real-time matters more than features. Information that arrives three days late might as well not arrive at all.
Build accountability into feedback systems. When an employee submits input, someone must respond within a set timeframe. When managers see patterns in team concerns, leadership must act on them. Feedback without follow-through creates cynicism, not connection.
Make recognition immediate and visible. When someone does good work, acknowledge it that day and where others can see it. Delayed recognition loses its impact.
Give everyone access to the same information. Role shouldn’t determine what you know about company direction, operational changes, or organizational wins.
Train managers on creating psychological safety. Operations training matters, but managers also need skills for building environments where people speak up, and for responding to input in ways that build trust rather than shut it down.
Track metrics that indicate culture health. Turnover tells you when people leave. Engagement scores, internal mobility, and time-to-productivity tell you why they stay and how well they’re connecting to the work.

Implementation isn’t something that should be rushed. Start with one system, prove its value, then expand. Pilot programs in high-turnover departments often reveal what works before rolling changes company-wide. Small wins build momentum for larger cultural shifts.

For hospitality brands to retain talent, they must create an environment where workers feel they belong to something worth staying for. While that sense of belonging doesn’t happen overnight, building the right systems makes it possible.

Ms. Willoughby-Petit

As Chief People Officer at LumApps, Louise Willoughby-Petit fosters a culture that values growth, diversity, and employee well-being. She brings 25 years of experience driving people-centric strategies within the technology and hospitality sectors. Her experience includes M&A leadership, HR transformation across 18+ countries, and designing compensation, talent, and learning strategies that deliver measurable impact. Today, she partners with CEOs and executive teams to align people strategy tightly with business priorities, enabling organizations to scale sustainably while building inclusive, high-performance cultures, and leads Global People Strategy at LumApps. Ms. Willoughby-Petit holds a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and a Certificate in Personnel Practice from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development in the UK.

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Hotel Newswire is a newswire service that distributes press releases on behalf of our users. If you decide to submit a press release for distribution through our system we will transmit your entire press release including any personal information therein contained to our media contacts and online distribution points including search engines. This is the only redistribution of your information that we engage in. Your submission of press releases through our system indicates consent with this policy. The information we collect during your registration process is used to notify users about updates to our service and inform users of any special events hosted by Hotel Newswire. This information is not shared with other organizations for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Cookies: Our system requires the use of cookies to enable the user to log back into our website to access information from the newswire, without having to log in each time using the required username and password.

If you do not want to receive email from us in the future, please let us know by following instructions included in our communication with you. Users who supply us with telephone numbers online may receive telephone contact from us regarding their account, or informing them of new products and services available on the HotelExecutive website. If you do not wish to receive such telephone calls, please edit your account and remove your phone number from your account profile. This can be done from your user account menu.

Ad Servers: We do not partner with or have any relationship with any ad server companies. From time to time, we may use customer information for new uses not previously disclosed in our privacy notice. If our information practices change at any time, we will post the policy changes to our website to notify you of these changes and provide you with the ability to opt out of these new uses. If you are concerned about how your information is used, you should check back at our website periodically.

Upon request we provide site visitors with access to all information (including proprietary information) that we maintain about them. Users can access this information by logging in to their account.

Security: We always use industry-standard encryption technologies while transferring and receiving user data exchanged with our site. We have appropriate security measures in place in our physical facilities to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of information that we have collected from you on our site. We do not store credit card information in our systems.

If you feel that this site is not following its stated information policy, you may contact us.

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Hotel Business Solutions

Re-Inventing Hotel Procurement Payments: How Digital Transformation is Strengthening Trust, Security, and Efficiency
By Phil Beck, GM, BirchStreet Pay, BirchStreet Systems

Modernizing procurement payments is becoming essential for hotels seeking stronger security, enhanced sustainability, and improved supplier trust. Outdated, paper-based methods slow operations, increase fraud risk, and strain vendor relationships. By shifting to automated digital payments, virtual cards, embedded workflows and by leveraging real-time data, hotels can reduce costs, improve cash... Read on...

Frenchman's Reef: Dining in a Renewed Paradise

By Anita Summers, Principal, Cooper Carry

In 2017, Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria struck the northeastern Caribbean Islands in a devastating back-to-back blow, causing detrimental damage to the then-Frenchman’s Reef Marriott Resort and adjacent Morningstar Beach Resort. Having originally opened in 1973, the beloved St. Thomas resorts were forced to close their doors and begin the rebuilding process. Rebuilding and Restoring The years following the devastation from the hurricanes consisted of a change in ownership and management, extreme weather occurrences and construction stalls due to the pandemic. However, in 2023, 50 years after the resort’s original debut, Frenchman’s Reef opened its...

Mastering The Art of High Touch Customer Service

By Kaye Gitibin, CEO & Co-Founder, Go Rentals

We live in an era that is dominated by automation and digital interactions, where high-touch customer service stands out as a personalized, relationship-driven approach to engaging with customers. It truly goes beyond basic transactions by focusing specifically on tailored experiences, deep connections, and proactive solutions that anticipate client needs before they even arise. High-touch service is not just about responding to customer inquiries - it’s all about creating memorable moments that build lasting trust and loyalty. This same high-touch service is more than just solving problems; it is about carefully curating personalized experiences that leave a lasting impression. Small...

Redefining Hospitality Through Sustainability and Innovation

By Erika Harms, Global Director of Sustainability, Iberostar Hotels & Resorts

When TIME Magazine named Iberostar one of the 100 Most Influential Companies of 2025, we felt so proud—but also humbled. A recognition of this kind is not the destination of our journey, but a reminder that we are on a good path, even as so much work lies ahead. For us, sustainability is not a project or a campaign. It is a transformation—one that began with the Fluxà family’s long-term vision and Gloria Fluxà’s bold decision to launch Iberostar Wave of Change in 2017. Her conviction was clear: the future of tourism depends on healthy oceans, thriving...

Trends in Hospitality Financing Amidst Economic Headwinds

By Shivan Perera, Managing Director of CRE, Bridge Marketplace

It’s no question that economic uncertainty has fueled market volatility, from sharp stock market swings to elevated borrowing costs. As a result, the hospitality sector is feeling the pressure. Headwinds such as rising labor, insurance, and property tax costs continue to squeeze margins, while RevPAR growth has plateaued following the post-pandemic surge. These trends are putting downward pressure on hotel values, with forecasts pointing to slower growth and declining valuations across many segments. Softening revenues and compressing margins are eroding profitability and making assets less attractive to investors and more challenging for lenders to finance. In this higher-rate environment,...

Data-Driven Decision-Making in Hotel Revenue Management

By Nicholas Tsabourakis, Founder & Managing Director, Bespoke Revenue Management

In today's fiercely competitive hospitality landscape, where guest preferences evolve rapidly and market dynamics fluctuate unpredictably, revenue management stands as an indispensable cornerstone for hotels seeking to thrive. Revenue management transcends mere price adjustments; it embodies a strategic orchestration of pricing, inventory, and distribution channels to optimise revenue and profitability while meeting guest demand. Within this intricate balancing act lies the pivotal role of data-an unparalleled asset empowering modern hotels to make informed, proactive decisions that surpass the traditional paradigms of revenue optimisation. The hospitality industry's reliance on revenue management isn't merely a choice; it's a necessity...

Re-Evaluating Operations: A Truly Results-Orientated Approach Starts from The Top

By John Young, Food & Beverage + Consulting Solutions Expert, Strategic Solution Partners

When it comes to any business, whether you work for a company or yourself, success is reliant on the people you work with, hire, and lead. The way you lead will have an impact not only on your teams, but, crucially, on productivity, culture, and also on the bottom line. Effective leadership in the current hospitality climate requires fostering a strong relationship with all stakeholders, of which there are increasingly many. With the ownership and the management companies having a direct impact on property-level decisions, the role of a leader becomes multi-directional: they not only need to translate the...

Using Online Auctions to Navigate The Complexities of The Hospitality Market

By Steven Jacobs, President, Ten-X

Over the last four years, few industries have experienced disruption quite like the hospitality industry. First the lockdown measures and travel restrictions of 2020 and 2021 brought demand to a standstill, leading to significant declines in occupancy and revenue. In 2022, after lockdown restrictions lifted and travel skyrocketed, hospitality experienced a similar rebound. Some chain scales even surpassed their pre-pandemic levels as a result of the drastically heightened demand. Hotel performance had reached the stratosphere. But now, two years later, we’re starting to see a return to earth. As the President of the largest and most active...

Can Wellness Be Taught to Hotel Guests?

By Simon Saunders, VP of Strategic Health & Wellness, RLA Global

The integration of wellness into the hospitality industry has become more than just a trend; it's a paradigm shift from opulence and excess to active promoters and drivers of wellness lifestyles. Within the hotels and resorts that make wellness hospitality a pillar of their business, there is an ever-diversifying range of services and experiences to meet the rapidly evolving needs of guests. What Are the Potential Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies for Incorporating Wellness Education Into the Guest Experience? Within a spa treatment setting, a guest is educated by being led through a practice or therapy which heightens...

Enhancing Guest Experiences and Services in Hospitality

By Jennifer Barnwell, President, Curator Hotel & Resorts Collection

As the hospitality industry evolves, boutique and independent hotels are at the forefront of distinguishing themselves by curating unique and memorable experiences. Delivering a superior guest stay that includes the option to create an itinerary of experiences has become the top strategy for properties to build guest loyalty and earn positive reviews in a competitive market. According to a recent study by Medallia, 61% of consumers are willing to spend more with companies that provide a customized experience. This presents a significant opportunity for the hotel industry to enhance revenue by adopting strategies that speak to what their guests...

Managing An Evolving Workforce and Gen Z Employees

By Kenneth Heymann, Managing Director, Heymann2 & Associates

When Baby Boomers entered the workforce in the 1970’s and 1980’s, organizations were dominated by Builders (also known as Traditionalists - see graphic 1), people whose early years were defined by the Great Depression and World War II. That cohort generally supported a hierarchical environment with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. People joined organizations and anticipated long careers within the same company. In turn, Gen Xers were managed primarily by Boomers who came of age under the influence of the Traditionalists. Essentially, each subsequent cohort is managed and influenced by earlier cohorts while sharing the unique generational experiences and attitudes...

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