by Alan Ching
Senior Vice President, Operations — West
The Service Companies
During more than a decade in casino operations and revenue management — with perspectives ranging from housekeeping supervisor to senior vice president — I have seen how the powerful strategic potential of outsourcing can be easily misunderstood.
Here’s how it starts: A general manager is frustrated — not necessarily with costs, but with team performance. Rooms aren’t turning efficiently. EVS coverage is inconsistent. A third-party vendor isn’t delivering on its contract. Leadership bandwidth is being consumed by daily staffing problems, and the effects are a drag on the guest experience.
Then someone suggests outsourcing — or re-evaluating an existing outsourcing relationship. Immediately, the focus shifts to one question: Can we do it for less than we’re spending now? That’s a valid question. But it’s not the right question for an effective workforce strategy.
The Real Reason Executives Call
Most leaders who reach out to The Service Companies aren’t primarily looking to cut costs. They’re frustrated by staff shortages, turnover, overtime costs, and staffing vendors who can’t hold up their end of the agreement.
The problem is not labor cost — it’s labor instability, and the downstream impact
that instability has on guest experience and brand reputation.
Evaluating outsourcing only on the hard costs — hourly wages and headcount comparisons — misses the complete picture. When you don’t add up the operational costs and management burdens of recruiting, onboarding, workers’ comp, general liability, and overhead for scheduling and HR, your comparison of outsourcing versus in-house staffing is built on incomplete math.
What Covid Taught Us About Workforce Strategy
The pre-pandemic labor environment is not coming back. Since 2020, hiring in the hospitality sector has been a persistent struggle. Properties have responded with wage increases, signing bonuses, and expanded benefits — but they’re still coming up short on coverage.
The consequences are costly. Short-staffed departments drive up overtime. Team members working double shifts struggle to meet quality standards. Guest scores decline. Management wastes time reacting to problems rather than addressing the underlying causes.
The traditional solutions — hire more, manage harder — are no longer sufficient. Structural pressures in the current labor market have made some roles difficult to staff through conventional recruiting. Gaming and hospitality are being forced to think differently about how to build and sustain a resilient operational workforce.
The Metrics That Actually Matter
When an executive team evaluates operational performance, the analysis must go deeper than labor rate per hour. Here are the primary metrics that define a high-performing casino resort:
Guest satisfaction is the north star. Casino guests will return to a property that feels clean and professionally managed. When guests encounter inconsistency — a room that isn’t ready, a public space that hasn’t been reset, a service interaction that falls short — they may not come back, and they’re likely to say something about it online before they leave the property.
Speed and consistency determine revenue opportunity. In gaming, every hour matters. Delayed room turnover doesn’t just frustrate guests — it reduces the time they have to dine, enjoy entertainment, and participate in the gaming experience. Operational throughput and guest revenue generation are directly linked in ways that many balance sheets never capture.
Labor reliability reduces hidden costs. Beyond the hard cost of wages, labor instability generates soft costs that are rarely tracked but are very real: continuous recruiting, repeated onboarding cycles, productivity losses during ramp-up periods, and management time diverted from strategic priorities. A reliable, stable workforce eliminates these impediments to growth.
Employee retention and workforce stability compound over time. When teams are well-trained and consistently deployed, standards become predictable. Experienced workers build institutional knowledge about a property’s standards, guests, and operational rhythms. That knowledge has real value — value that disappears every time a position turns over.
Operational flexibility allows properties to scale. Gaming properties face swings in demand that few other environments can match — major events, peak seasons, new venue openings, and unexpected staffing gaps. The ability to respond quickly to demand fluctuations, without sacrificing service quality, is a meaningful competitive advantage.
Brand reputation is a long-cycle asset. A casino resort’s brand is built — and eroded — over thousands of individual guest experiences. The impact of operational inconsistency rarely shows up in the same quarter it originates. It accumulates quietly in review scores, repeat visitor rates, and word-of-mouth referrals, long before it becomes visible in revenue.
Revenue impact is the outcome of all the above. Properties that deliver operational excellence generate more repeat business, command better pricing power, and protect their investment in entertainment, gaming floor, and amenities by enhancing the guest experience.
The Guest Experience Is an Integrated System
One of the most persistent misconceptions in casino operations is the idea that housekeeping, EVS, food and beverage, and front-line departments are functionally separate. They are not.
From the guest’s perspective, they are all reflections of one property — and every department contributes to whether that property feels clean, welcoming, and deserving of a return visit.
When service responsiveness is inconsistent — even in a single area — it colors guest perception of the entire stay. New guests notice small things. Returning guests notice even more, because they’re comparing today’s experience to the one that brought them back. Both of these groups will make decisions about future visits based on what they encounter.
The decisions that shape the guest experience — staffing levels, operational
protocols, quality oversight, and leadership presence — are made in back-of-house
conversations that few guests ever see, but every guest can feel.
Staffing Positions is One Component of Managing Operations
The best-performing properties understand the difference between filling open positions and building an operation designed to consistently deliver exceptional service. They don’t treat housekeeping, EVS, or stewarding as isolated labor categories. They manage them as integrated components of an overall guest experience system.
Superior guest experience requires trained teams with clear operating standards, dedicated on-site leadership, proactive quality control, and accountability built around measurable outcomes. It also requires a customized staffing plan that reflects the property’s unique operational flow.
Achieving world-class guest experience, whether through an in-house team or with a managed services partner, challenges leaders to stop asking “are all of our positions covered?” and start asking “are all of our standards being met?” Answering that challenge requires a higher level of accountability from every partner involved.
What True Accountability Looks Like
When casino executives think about outsourcing, concerns about accountability are legitimate. Loss of control, inconsistent quality, misalignment with brand standards — these are real risks – unless the partner is structured to own the operation rather than simply supply bodies.
True accountability in a managed services context starts with ownership. A genuine partner
doesn’t provide staffing and then leave the property to manage whatever happens next.
An accountable partner takes responsibility for recruiting, onboarding, training, quality assurance, compliance, safety, and ongoing performance improvement. They provide dedicated on-site leadership. They maintain transparent communication with property management. And they treat continuous improvement as an ongoing obligation.
For casino operators, this means looking for partners whose operational model has built in those elements from the start — not as options or add-ons, but as the foundation.
With full visibility into how standards are set, tracked, and enforced by their operational partner, concerns about control are diminished. Rather than asking “can we trust an outside partner?”, property leadership can ask “how will this partner earn and maintain our trust?” The answer is through structure, transparency, and documented results.
The High Cost of the Lowest Price
Prioritizing lowest-cost labor is a high-risk gamble. It plays out in properties across the country, often in ways that don’t show up on the labor expense line until damage has already been done.
A low-cost staffing model that delivers inconsistent service will generate many hidden costs. Rooms that aren’t ready will delay check-ins, reducing guest time on the property. Public spaces that don’t meet standards will bring complaints at the front desk, comped accommodations, and negative reviews. High turnover in a lowest-cost model will mean continuous recruiting and onboarding, consuming management time and degrading operational consistency.
The math only works if the staffing model delivers reliability, quality, and stability.
A model that prioritizes lowest cost over performance will always cost more in the long run.
Sustainable performance comes from reliable staffing, consistent execution, legal compliance, and accountability focused on outcomes. Without these elements in operation, a property cannot protect its brand reputation, maintain guest satisfaction scores, or anticipate stronger financial performance over time.
Flexibility as a Competitive Advantage
One of the most valuable benefits a managed services partner can bring is operational flexibility — the ability to scale up or down in response to demand — without the lag time and management burden of rushed hiring, repeated layoffs, and scrambling for temporary labor.
A major boxing event, a concert series, or a convention block can bring a sudden demand for operational capacity that most properties struggle to mobilize through internal hiring alone.
A managed services partner with established recruiting infrastructure and proven deployment capabilities is uniquely well-positioned to respond to those demands without sacrificing service standards or burning out existing staff.
Flexibility also matters during a crisis. An illness outbreak on a team, a sudden departure in a supervisory role, a spike in occupancy following a competitor’s temporary shutdown — these situations require a rapid, dependable response – and properties with the right operational partnerships are always prepared.
The ability to remain operationally consistent regardless of demand fluctuation is
a powerful competitive advantage — and one of the clearest places where the strategic
value of outsourcing goes well beyond the significance of hourly wages.
Leadership Gets Its Time Back
The bonus benefit of an effective managed services model is the recapture of management bandwidth. While an experienced partner manages recruiting, service quality, and day-to-day execution, property leaders can focus their most valuable skills on growing the business.
That means reviewing guest feedback instead of coverage boards…walking the property with fresh eyes rather than putting out staffing fires…developing team culture…thinking strategically about competitive positioning…and dialogue with ownership about long-term growth.
Over time, this shift in leadership focus has a compounding effect. Properties where leaders operate at a strategic level make better decisions, build stronger cultures, and deliver better guest experiences. That translates into reviews, reputation, and revenue.
The goal of managed services is not to replace leaders. The goal is to free the
the leader to focus on the guest experience, the brand, and the business,
rather than the daily mechanics of staffing.
Looking Ahead
Outsourcing in gaming and hospitality continues to evolve. The properties I work with across the western United States are no longer evaluating operational partnerships primarily on cost. Their performance goals are high standards, reliable performance, agile flexibility, and the ability to consistently deliver measurable business outcomes over time.
As guest expectations continue to rise and labor markets remain competitive, the value of a strategic operational partnership will become more apparent. The properties that recognize outsourcing as a performance lever — not simply a cost-reduction tool — will be prepared to adapt, compete, and deliver the guest experiences that drive long-term growth.