Stop Running the Schedule. Start Running the Hotel.

How luxury hospitality leaders can break the chronic staffing cycle and reclaim their focus on guest experience.

By Steven Dougherty, The Service Companies

After more than 30 years in hospitality operations — in hotels, resorts, and outsourced service organizations — I have learned that the leaders who are best positioned to elevate the guest experience are often the ones least able to focus on it. They’re too busy running the schedule.

That’s not a failure of leadership. It’s a structural problem. Chronic staffing instability — particularly in housekeeping and overnight operations — is often the most persistent and costly burden on hotel management bandwidth. And properties that don’t develop a strategy for easing that burden will find they are trapped in a cycle that erodes operational performance and undermines business results.

The Staffing Crisis Is Hiding in Plain Sight

Ask any hotel GM or director of rooms about staffing problems. You’ll hear a familiar pattern. Call-outs come in before the morning briefing. Boards aren’t fully staffed. Managers are jumping in to cover gaps instead of reviewing the previous night’s scores, coaching their teams, or thinking about anything beyond today’s departure list.

This is what chronic staffing instability looks like on the ground: not a dramatic crisis, but a relentless, grinding game of catch-up – wasting time, attention, and energy that should be focused on revenue.

The data behind this reality is striking. According to recent industry research, the U.S. hospitality sector carries a turnover rate of roughly 50% — the highest of any industry in the country (1). Room attendant turnover has, at times, exceeded 100% annually, meaning the average housekeeper turns over more than once per year (2). In early 2024 alone, nearly three million people left leisure and hospitality jobs — more than double the national average for other sectors (3).

And yet, the true cost of this instability is rarely captured in a single line on an operating budget.

The Hidden Cost No One Is Tracking

When hotel leaders think about turnover costs, they focus on the obvious: recruiting fees, onboarding time, and the hourly wage drag while new hires ramp up. Those are readily apparent. But the deeper cost, the one that’s harder to quantify — and harder to fix — is the cost of inconsistency.

Industry estimates show that replacing a single frontline employee can cost a hospitality business $5,000 in lost productivity (4). But that figure doesn’t capture what happens while the property continually operates with an inexperienced, understaffed, and poorly trained team.

Some managers spend half their working hours on staffing issues — scheduling, hiring, retraining, and coverage. That’s time they can’t spend reviewing guest feedback, developing team culture, and thinking strategically about how to differentiate the property brand. And when leadership attention is exhausted by fighting fires, standards can start to slip.

Rooms aren’t turned on time. Public areas aren’t reset properly overnight. The front desk fields more complaints. Maintenance is reactive, rather than preventive. Eventually, guests notice. The chronic inconsistency shows up as cleanliness complaints, delayed check-ins, and sooner or later, negative online reviews — where it has a direct and measurable impact on revenue.

Why Housekeeping and Overnight Are Ground Zero

Housekeeping is the operational backbone of every hotel. According to the American Hotel & Lodging Association, housekeeping is also the most frequently cited area of active staffing shortage, with more than half of hotel owners reporting chronic understaffing (5).

Overnight staffing has its own distinct challenges, as fewer people want to work those hours. And without dedicated leadership on site after midnight, things are overlooked — until the next day when areas haven’t been reset, supplies haven’t been restocked, and the property doesn’t look the way a luxury guest expects at 7 a.m.

The structural pressures on our industry are persistent. Tighter labor pools, physical demands that accelerate burnout, limited long-term career appeal for certain roles, and labor competition from gig-economy alternatives have made it fundamentally harder to recruit and retain these positions. 

Why Traditional Fixes Fall Short

The instinctive response to a staffing shortage is more hiring. But hiring without structure doesn’t solve the problem. And it can make it worse. Over-hiring to compensate for turnover creates its own inefficiencies. Constant onboarding disrupts team cohesion and slows productivity. And if the underlying supervision and operational structure are already weak, adding bodies won’t produce consistency.

The other common approach — pushing managers to absorb more — is also unsustainable, accelerating burnout at the leadership level. This is an industry-wide problem, as half of hotel managers report feeling burned out themselves (6). When the people responsible for running the operation are exhausted and reactive, the operation suffers in ways that can be difficult to reverse.

The solution is not another staffing patch – but rather an entirely new strategy — one that removes the burden of chronic labor instability from the property’s management team and replaces it with consistent, accountable, professionally managed operations.

Rethinking Outsourcing as a Strategic Tool

In the early years, outsourcing in hospitality was primarily associated with cost reduction. That framing has limited how hotel leaders think about it — and, in some cases, has led to disappointing outcomes when cost savings were pursued without proper attention to service quality and provider accountability.

In a more productive model, outsourcing done right is about establishing the operational ownership and stability that many properties struggle to achieve on their own. That distinction matters, especially in the luxury segment, where high standards are non-negotiable, and guest expectations are unforgiving.

I work with luxury hotels and resorts across the country on exactly this kind of engagement. What we bring to a property is not just labor — it is a structured team, already trained, with leadership on site every night and accountability built into the model. The housekeeping programs we design are process-driven and focused on metrics, with the kind of supervisory coverage that ensures consistency whether it’s a Monday overnight in February or a Saturday during peak season.

The concerns hotel leaders typically raise about outsourcing — loss of control, inconsistent quality, and misalignment with brand standards — are worth taking seriously. But in my experience, they are also responsive to measurement and control. When hotel leadership has full visibility into the operating standards, reporting, and oversight structure of the partner they bring in, those concerns recede quickly. The question isn’t whether to trust an outside partner; it’s how the partner earns and maintains that trust through structure, transparency, and results.

When the Staffing Pressure is Lifted

The operational benefits of a managed services model are more consistent room readiness, better overnight reset, and fewer guest complaints arising from cleanliness or delays. Beyond these fundamentals, the impact that delivers the most value to senior leadership develops more gradually. 

When managers are no longer spending half their time on staffing issues, they start running the hotel again. They’re reviewing guest feedback instead of coverage boards. They’re walking the property with fresh eyes, having strategic conversations with ownership, and thinking about how to build the kind of team culture that drives long-term guest loyalty.

Over time, revenue follows operational consistency. Better guest experiences produce better reviews. Better reviews drive stronger demand and pricing power. In a segment where discerning guests have many options and long memories, the property’s brand and reputation must rise to succeed.

The Path Forward

Staffing instability is not going away. The structural pressures that make some roles difficult to fill and retain are embedded in our labor markets, and this industry will be managing them for years to come. The question for hotel leaders is whether they should continue to absorb the cost internally or adopt a more sustainable model.

The strategic challenge is not labor cost. It is management capacity, operational consistency, and ultimately, guest experience. Meeting this challenge requires thinking differently about where your team’s time and energy is being wasted — and what it could be worth to get that time back.

About the Author

Steven Dougherty is an Account Executive with The Service Companies and a hospitality operations leader with more than 30 years of experience in hotels, resorts, and outsourced service organizations.   He works closely with luxury hotels and resorts nationwide to develop turnkey housekeeping, overnight cleaning, and specialty service programs that help hotel operators maintain brand standards while navigating ongoing labor and operational challenges.

The Service Companies is a national leader in integrated housekeeping, staffing, and managed labor solutions for luxury hotels, commercial properties, healthcare facilities, and high-rise residential communities. We partner with operational leaders who want to reduce the management burden of chronic staffing instability, enhance brand standards, and deliver a consistently exceptional guest experience. To learn more about how we work with properties like yours, visit theservicecompanies.com.

References:

1. Employee Turnover in the Hospitality Industry: Why It Happens and How to Fix It. – Hybrid Payroll
2. Hospitality Hits All-Time Workforce High: Turnover at Crisis Levels – Hotel Business
3. Leisure and Hospitality Top List of Industries with Highest Quit Rates in US – HR Dive
4. Center for Hospitality Research, Cornell University
5. American Hotel & Lodging Association
6. Hospitality Industry Under Pressure as Workers Face Increased Burnout – Axonify