Europe’s hotel industry struggles with ongoing staff shortages

The European hospitality manufacture continues to grapple with important labour shortages and skills gaps, according to a January 2026 presumption insubstantial published by HOTREC, the umbrella organisation for hotels, restaurants, bars and cafés successful Europe.

The report, Skills and Labour Shortages successful Hospitality – A Roadmap for Action, highlights persistent workforce challenges and proposes argumentation recommendations to enactment workforce improvement and labour proviso crossed the sector.

The hospitality and edifice assemblage remains 1 of the EU’s largest employers, covering astir 10 cardinal jobs crossed much than 2 cardinal businesses.

Despite immoderate easing of recruitment pressures since the pandemic, galore Member States inactive study important workforce gaps, with the assemblage missing astir 10% of its workforce connected average.

#Shortages are particularly acute successful tourism-dependent economies specified arsenic Portugal, Spain, Greece, Romania and Czechia, impacting operational capableness during highest seasons.

The study notes that skills shortages person intensified arsenic companies accommodate to digitalisation, sustainability requirements and changing lawsuit expectations. Employers progressively mention needs for integer competences, sustainability-related skills and beardown interpersonal abilities alongside accepted operational expertise.

These longer-term trends are adding to recruitment difficulties and hazard constraining maturation arsenic request rises.

To code labour shortages and skills deficits, HOTREC sets retired a comprehensive roadmap based connected 4 cardinal pillars:

• Education and grooming reforms to grow upskilling, reskilling and apprenticeship schemes, with curricula aligned to aboriginal skills needs. The study emphasises lifelong learning and stronger links betwixt grooming providers and employers.

• Labour marketplace measures aimed astatine enhancing the representation and attractiveness of hospitality careers. This includes promoting divers enactment arrangements and vocation pathways to assistance clasp workers.

• Improved labour mobility wrong and beyond the EU, including amended usage of tools similar the EURES job-matching network, much accessible ineligible migration pathways, and enactment for affordable lodging for workers.

• Sustained funding astatine some EU and nationalist levels to enactment training, mobility initiatives and different workforce improvement efforts, peculiarly for tiny and medium-sized enterprises.

HOTREC’s investigation situates hospitality labour challenges wrong broader EU labour marketplace conditions, including an ageing population, labour marketplace slack and a fragile economical recovery.