What a Hotel in Salou Taught Me About Workforce Resilience

Sitting on the balcony of the Vila Romana hotel in Salou (part of the Ohtels group) and I was struck by something I can't stop thinking about.

This was my third visit over a five year period. And the staff are the same.

Not similar. The same people. The same faces, in the same roles, doing the same job with the same quiet precision. The cleaner who has the foyer done before 8am. The kids entertainer who somehow stays genuinely warm at 10pm after an eleven-hour day. The reception team who've seen more difficult guests than I could imagine and still greet you like you're the first person through the door.

In Ireland, we'd call this extraordinary. Here, it looks like a normal weekday.

Why does this matter?

I research workforce resilience in essential services. Staff turnover is one of the most reliable diagnostic indicators - when people are leaving, something in the organisation isn't right. High turnover is expensive, operationally disruptive, and almost always a symptom of something deeper: poor management, inadequate investment in people, or a culture that extracts from workers rather than sustaining them.

Global hospitality turnover runs at 70-80% annually. In Ireland's near-full-employment economy, a busy hotel retaining most of its frontline team over six seasons would be remarkable. What I'm watching here is near-miraculous by those standards.

So what's actually going on?

It's not one thing. It's a system.

The structural labour market conditions matter. Spain's unemployment sits around 10-11%, with youth unemployment close to 24%. When you have fewer outside options, you invest in the job you have. 

Tourism is also existential to the Spanish economy in a way it simply isn't in Ireland. It represents around 14% of GDP and close to 15% of total employment. In some communities, over 20%. Hospitality isn't a stepping stone here; it is the career. That changes the psychological relationship between a worker and their role.

Collective bargaining plays a role too. Every hotel in Spain operates under provincial hospitality agreements and a National Labour Agreement for the sector. Workers know what they're entitled to. There's less of the precariousness that drives people out the door.

But (and this is important) none of those structural factors fully explain what I'm seeing. Because across Europe, hospitality turnover remains 25-35% annually even in markets with stronger labour protections. Spain itself has real workforce stability problems in the sector post-pandemic.

So what is Ohtels, or specifically this hotel, actually doing differently?

From everything I've read and observed: intentional investment in people as professionals, not inputs.

Ohtels describe themselves as "a leading chain in training and capacity building" and have received awards for their training programmes. Their social responsibility work includes integrating people facing barriers to employment, framed explicitly around dignity and opportunity. Their management responds personally and thoughtfully to guest feedback, including critical feedback.

Vertical integration matters too. Ohtels aren't outsourcing major operational functions, which removes one of the most reliable mechanisms for driving down wages and eroding worker security in the sector.

To understand how rare this is, look west.

Orlando (is the other place I visit regularly) and gives you the opposite end of the spectrum. Walt Disney World alone employs roughly 77,000 people. Universal needed 15,000 net new hires just to open Epic Universe last year. Between January and April 2024, nearly 3 million people left their roles in US leisure and hospitality. That's 204% above the national average quit rate. Annual sector turnover runs at 70-80%, consistently the highest of any industry in the United States.

Why? Workers in near-full-employment Florida can move between Disney, Universal, SeaWorld and hundreds of surrounding hotels at will. Union representation covers just 3% of the US hospitality sector. Wages average $19.61 an hour against a cross-industry figure of $28. When retail, logistics and the gig economy offer comparable pay for less physically and emotionally demanding work, the maths of staying in hospitality simply doesn't add up.

The result is what I've experienced over twenty years of visits to Orlando: you rarely see the same face twice. Not because the people aren't good, but because the conditions make sustained commitment irrational.

Ireland sits honestly in the middle. Better than Orlando, not close to Salou. Near-full employment gives our hospitality workers real choices, and too many Irish employers haven't yet made the case  (in pay, in culture, in how they treat the dignity of the role) for people to stay.

What this means for how I think about resilience

There's a version of "resilience" in the workforce literature that's essentially asking workers to absorb instability on behalf of organisations that won't invest in stability. I call it weaponised resilience, the expectation that frontline workers will keep performing excellently regardless of the conditions they're handed.

What I'm watching in Salou is the opposite. A workforce that is genuinely resilient and not because they've been conditioned to endure, but because the conditions around them make sustained, high-quality performance possible. Stability enables pride. Pride enables quality. Quality enables the kind of guest relationship where someone comes back five times and notices the same face behind the bar.

The question I'm bringing home with me isn't "why does Spain do this?" It's "what would it take to build this in Ireland?"

Because we have the people. We just haven't built the conditions - yet!

I'm a doctoral researcher examining workforce and leadership resilience in essential services, and CEO of FMSG — a facilities management company operating across Ireland. These are the questions I think about from the frontline up.