A new ranking of the best places to work in hospitality, published this year by The Caterer together with the workplace culture firm Korero, asked hotels, restaurants and hospitality groups across the UK to let their own employees rate them anonymously. The spread it turned up was striking. One boutique hotel reported staff turnover of just 2.84 percent in 2025. A restaurant group further down the same list reported turnover above 58 percent, nearly twenty times higher, in the very same labor market, hiring from roughly the same pool of talent.
What makes that gap interesting is that it is not simply a story about who pays the most. Korero co-founder Jo Harley, who has tracked what hospitality workers say they want for years, points out that the language has shifted over time. A decade ago, employees asked for respect and better communication. Today they ask for a positive, welcoming environment and leaders who genuinely support them. Fair pay still matters enormously, but on its own it rarely explains why one employer keeps its people for years while another is training replacements every few months.
What the steadiest employers are actually doing
Looking across the ranking, the employers with the lowest turnover tend to share a handful of concrete habits rather than one big idea. Some guarantee hours and publish rotas well in advance, so staff can build a life around the job instead of around a schedule that changes every week. Others have moved to paying wages, overtime and service charge in the period they were actually earned, rather than making people wait for it. One dining group on the list cut absenteeism by 21 percent after rolling out a structured wellbeing programme, the kind of result that gets a finance director's attention just as much as an HR director's.
None of this is exotic. It is closer to basic respect, delivered consistently enough that people can actually feel it. The employers near the top of the ranking are rarely the ones throwing the most money at the problem. They are the ones whose staff believe, month after month, that staying is the better bet than leaving.
Retention starts before the first shift
This is exactly the conversation we have with the hotels and restaurants we work with abroad at ItalianExperience. Retention is not something that starts on an employee's first day. It starts with who gets hired, and whether that person arrives already trained, already clear on what the role actually involves, and already supported through the paperwork that lets them stay legally for the long term. That is a large part of why our recruitment and visa support is built around Italian hospitality professionals with real formal training and kitchen or front of house experience, not a quick placement, and why we stay involved through the visa process rather than handing a candidate off the moment a contract is signed.
Data referenced from The Caterer's Best Places to Work in Hospitality 2026 ranking, produced in partnership with Korero.
The best retention numbers in hospitality were never really about the paycheck. They were about hiring someone who wanted to stay, and then giving them a reason to.