By Anton Gillis, Co-Founder and CEO of HAMAC
In a country with one of the world’s highest unemployment rates, where nearly one in three adults is without work, the hospitality sector should be a natural source of jobs. It is already one of the South African economy’s most labour-intensive sectors: tourism and hospitality contribute close to 9% of GDP, support more than 1.5 million jobs, and are expected to grow as travel demand expands.
Yet across the country, hotels, lodges and restaurants say they are struggling to find and retain staff.
Not just any staff, but competent, reliable people who enjoy the work, can cope with the demands of a service business and grow into leadership roles. As occupancy recovers across much of the sector, that demand should make it easier to rebuild teams. Instead, revenue is being swallowed by rising costs and ongoing staffing pressure that is expected to worsen in coming years. This means that fuller hotels, lodges and guesthouses have not translated into healthier margins, leaving little room to hire, train or retain the people they need.
Across South Africa, operators complain about the same problem: Finding people who show up, take responsibility and understand what hospitality work actually involves has become increasingly difficult.
Competence is one of the biggest issues flagged in HAMAC’s flagship South African Hoteliers Report, with more than three-quarters of senior hospitality leaders complaining about the battle to find suitable people.
Where the shortfall is most apparent is in leadership and soft skills. Seventy-one percent of respondents say graduates lack leadership capability, while 59% point to weaknesses in communication and other soft skills. In a service business, which is all about people, those shortcomings have immediate consequences, so managers are pulled into day-to-day problems that should be handled on the floor, leaving less time to plan, train teams or keep operations on track.
Finding good people is only half the battle; keeping them is even harder. People leave for pay, burnout and limited opportunities for growth, which means the staff turnover never really stops. Because the cost of hiring is spread across recruitment, training and management time, the real impact of staff turnover is easy to overlook.
When someone leaves, the impact is immediate. It means shifts need to be covered until a suitable replacement is found, someone has to recruit, and someone has to train. In the meantime, the rest of the team carries the extra load. Over time, that pressure wears teams down, slows decision-making and makes it harder to maintain consistent service standards.
Revenue is rarely lost not through a single staff departure. Instead, it erodes over time – almost a death by a thousand cuts – through slow decision-making, poor handovers and inconsistent, or poor, service.
This isn’t a problem unique to South Africa. The World Travel & Tourism Council’s Future of Work in Travel and Tourism report, released in September with Oxford Economics, flags a global staffing shortfall in travel and tourism. Across 20 major economies – including South Africa, Germany, France, Japan and Saudi Arabia – staff supply has not kept up with demand, particularly in service-intensive roles.
By 2035, the report expects there to be a shortfall of 8.6 million hospitality workers globally, around 18% below demand levels, which explains why staffing pressure is a problem even in high-unemployment markets like South Africa.
Simply put: Demand for travel and tourism jobs is growing faster than the supply of people who are ready, willing and able to do the work.
It’s not only about entry-level roles. Shortages are expected across frontline, supervisory and leadership positions, and technology won’t save the day. Without stronger retention, clearer career paths and better management capacity, countries will continue to struggle with the service industry.
Too often, the response is to frame the problem as a training issue or a generational one. Young people, it is said, are not work-ready, but many tourism staff left the sector during the pandemic and didn’t return. People have also changed their expectations of work, and industries that demand long hours and flexibility without offering clear career opportunities or support are a much harder sell.
This isn’t just a product of the wrong “mindset”; the system is also the problem. When entry-level roles lack support, leadership pathways are unclear and managers are stretched thin, professionalism is hard to sustain.
What’s the answer? Technology does help, but automation and AI only work when teams are stable, systems are in place and managers have the time to implement them properly.
That’s where the industry is missing a trick. People are still treated as a cost to be managed, rather than as the glue that keeps an operation together. The time lost to constant recruitment, the drain of burnout, and the effect of slower decisions are spread across the entire business. These hidden costs don’t jump out at you from a spreadsheet, so they’re easy to ignore when it comes to investment decisions.
This isn’t something the government can fix, and it won’t be solved by schools and tertiary training institutions in isolation. Operators, investors and industry bodies all have a role to play, from how roles are designed, to how leaders are developed, to how technology is used in practice.
The sector is carrying a people problem it hasn’t properly priced in. Until human capacity is treated as something to be built, cherished and maintained, rather than worked around, the pressure on hospitality won’t ease – no matter how strong the demand.