Every hotel manager knows a stubborn number. Hospitality turnover in the United States runs somewhere between 70 and 80 percent a year in accommodation and food services, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures compiled by payroll and HR firm Netchex this year. That number sounds alarming until you look at what is actually driving it, because the answer turns out to be more workable than most people expect. It is not only about pay.
Netchex's 2026 turnover benchmarks put a real figure on the cost side too. Replacing an hourly hospitality worker earning around 16 dollars an hour runs somewhere between 10,000 and 17,000 dollars once recruiting, training, overtime coverage and lost productivity are counted. For a 200 room hotel with a typical staff of 100 hourly employees, a 60 percent annual turnover rate works out to roughly 720,000 dollars a year, before guest experience scores even enter the picture. Wage competitiveness usually gets blamed first, but the same research found that schedule unpredictability ranks just as high, sometimes higher, in what departing employees actually say pushed them out the door.
The Schedule Problem Nobody Budgets For
Employees who cannot plan their week around their shifts tend to leave even when they are paid fairly. The second biggest factor is simpler still: the relationship with a direct supervisor is, according to the same hospitality turnover research, the strongest single predictor of whether someone stays. Properties with consistent, fair scheduling and managers who communicate well keep staff longer than competitors who simply pay a dollar more an hour.
What This Year's Retention Leaders Are Actually Doing
The 2026 HR in Hospitality Awards, covered in April by industry outlet Talents for Travel, found a consistent pattern among the winning properties: they measure retention before they market it. Internal promotion ratios, first 90 day attrition and engagement scores get shared with staff before any recruitment campaign goes out, which turns culture from a slogan into something a new hire can actually verify. One Hyatt property highlighted in that coverage combined mobile scheduling, peer recognition and structured manager check ins, and cut first 90 day attrition from roughly 32 percent to 18 percent in a year, while internal promotion rates for hourly staff rose more than 10 percentage points over the same period.
Peer recognition alone showed up repeatedly in that research as one of the higher return investments available to hospitality employers, with several benchmark studies citing an average 24 percent improvement in retention year over year among teams with mature recognition programs compared with similar teams without one. None of this requires a large capital outlay. It requires attention to the parts of the job that show up on a shift, not in a brochure.
For a property already paying market wages and still watching hires walk out the door, the fix suggested by this evidence sits less in the compensation line and more in workforce systems: schedules published further in advance, managers trained specifically on communication and fairness, and simple recognition habits that do not require a new software budget. Those are the levers this year's award winning properties are pulling, and they tend to compound faster than another wage increase does.
We see the other half of this equation at ItalianExperience, on the hiring side. When we place an Italian chef or hotel professional with an employer abroad, months of vetting and, often, a visa process have already filtered for people who are serious about building a career, not just filling a season. That head start matters once a hire arrives on property, because a motivated placement paired with the kind of consistent scheduling and management practices this year's award winners are proving out is what actually turns a good hire into a long one.
Data referenced from Netchex and Talents for Travel, drawing on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics turnover figures and the 2026 HR in Hospitality Awards research.
The properties winning the retention game this year did not discover a new perk. They just started paying as much attention to the schedule as they do to the paycheck.