A recent hotel industry white paper made a point we’ve been circling for a while: The old staffing model is gone.
A few highlights that stood out:
- Wage elevation is permanent, not cyclical.
- Turnover is now a predictable operating expense.
- Luxury properties face the biggest mismatch between service expectations and available talent.
- Extended-stay models are outperforming in part because weekly housekeeping aligns better with workforce realities.
- Forward-looking operators are shifting from payroll as a percent of revenue to payroll per occupied room.
None of this should shock anyone operating in Hawaiʻi. We’ve already talked about hotel wages and benefits and an aging workforce pipeline.
The takeaway isn’t that labor is expensive. It’s that the operating model many of us built around abundant labor no longer exists.
