Retaining talent: Missing link in tourism’s recovery

With demand forecast to rise sharply in coming years, the challenge is not merely to attract tourists, but to ensure that those who serve them are adequately trained, motivated, and retained

Sri Lanka’s hotel and tourism sector, a vital foreign exchange earner, faces a mounting labour shortage. A new study by the National Human Resource Development Council (NHRDC) warns that unless urgent measures are taken to address skills gaps, worker migration, and gender disparities, the sector’s growth prospects could be undermined.

Key takeaways

• Tourism directly contributes around 4% of GDP and 13% of foreign exchange earnings, employing approximately 450,000 people pre-pandemic.
• Labour demand is rising fastest in kitchen (35%), food & beverage (22.8%), and housekeeping (16.6%) departments.
• The industry remains male-dominated (76% vs. 24% female), with women underrepresented due to cultural barriers and limited flexibility at work.
• Over 60% of staff exits between 2020 and 2023 were due to overseas employment.
• Vocational training is heavily concentrated in cookery, with fewer trainees entering guest relations and management, creating a skills mismatch.
• Retaining talent has become a key challenge, with high migration, low career progression, and poor working conditions driving staff turnover.

Tourism recovery meets workforce shortages

The NHRDC’s Labour Market Trends in Sri Lanka – 2024 report places the hotel and tourism industry at the centre of the country’s economic recovery. Before the pandemic, tourism directly contributed around 4% to GDP and generated more than one-eighth of foreign exchange earnings. The sector also created significant indirect employment in linked industries such as transport, food production, handicrafts, and entertainment, amplifying its overall impact on the economy.

After years of shocks; from the 2019 Easter attacks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sector began to rebound in 2022. Tourist arrivals more than doubled in 2023 compared to the previous year, and during the first nine months of 2025, arrivals reached 1.7 million, with foreign exchange inflows showing similar momentum. Yet, as demand rises, the supply of skilled workers is failing to keep pace.

The report highlights that the emigration of hospitality professionals to higher-paying markets in the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia has left local hotels struggling to fill essential roles. The outflow is particularly high among experienced staff, weakening mentoring chains and reducing opportunities for knowledge transfer to new entrants.

Labour market gaps in the sector

The report identifies several critical workforce challenges:

• Migration drain: Between 2020 and 2023, migration abroad accounted for over 60% of resignations among hotel staff, depleting the pool of skilled employees, particularly in culinary and front-office roles.
• Gender imbalance: Men account for 76% of the hotel and tourism workforce, while women make up just 24%. The study attributes this to social stigma, rigid work schedules, safety concerns, and the absence of childcare facilities.
• Youth exclusion: Among 15–24-year-olds, unemployment remains high, 29.5% for females and 19.4% for males. Despite a large youth population, employers report difficulty finding staff with the right training and soft skills.
• Departmental shortages: Forecasts indicate steep rises in demand for kitchen, F&B, and housekeeping staff between 2024 and 2027, further tightening labour supply.

“Hotels are indeed seeing higher demand in these areas as tourism recovers,” noted a senior Human Resources Director from a leading hotel chain of the country. “These are the most operationally intensive departments, and as occupancy rises, the pressure to fill these roles has become more pronounced.”

While star-class hotels are able to absorb some of the impact by offering higher wages, small and medium-sized hotels, especially those in rural areas, face even greater challenges in retaining staff.

Training and skills mismatches

The NHRDC analysis reveals that while vocational training remains central to the industry’s labour supply, course enrolments are highly uneven.

• Cookery courses dominate, with over 3,000 students enrolling in 2024.
• Food and beverage and housekeeping courses also attract strong participation.
• By contrast, fewer than 200 students enrolled in guest relations courses in 2024.

This imbalance has created a clear skills mismatch, with oversupply in some trades and under-supply in others. Guest relations, travel management, and supervisory roles remain underrepresented, despite being critical to service quality and competitiveness.

“Most training still focuses on cookery because of strong overseas demand, leaving fewer professionals prepared for guest-facing and managerial roles,” the HR Director confirmed. “This imbalance makes it difficult to sustain service quality at the higher end of the market.”

The report further highlights that many vocational curricula are outdated and fail to address emerging industry needs. Areas such as multilingual communication, digital hospitality, and customer service excellence remain underdeveloped, leaving graduates ill-prepared for evolving expectations.

Why workers leave

The NHRDC’s survey of 108 hotels found that the majority of resignations between 2020 and 2023 were linked to better job prospects overseas, where hospitality roles offer higher pay, structured training, and more attractive benefits packages.

Other reasons for staff exits include limited career progression, particularly in smaller hotels with flat organisational structures; poor work-life balance due to long hours and irregular schedules; and inadequate benefits and incentives. For women, the lack of flexible hours, insufficient support systems, and safety concerns were cited as key barriers to remaining in the industry.

“Women find it difficult to balance personal and professional responsibilities, especially after marriage,” the HR Director added. “Unless we make the workplace more inclusive and supportive, we will continue to lose a valuable segment of the workforce.”

Policy and industry recommendations

The NHRDC concludes with a series of targeted interventions to strengthen the hotel and tourism workforce:

1. Introduce competitive wage structures to stem the outflow of skilled workers to foreign markets.

2. Expand vocational training programs beyond cookery to include guest relations, eco-tourism, wellness tourism, and digital hospitality.

3. Strengthen public–private partnerships between hotels, training institutes, and government agencies to align curricula with industry needs.

4. Enhance female participation through flexible work policies, safer environments, and childcare support.

5. Implement apprenticeship schemes to provide youth with hands-on training in hotels and restaurants.

“What the sector urgently needs are structured career pathways, diverse training options, and inclusive workplace practices,” the HR Director emphasised. “If we fail to address these areas, we risk undermining the very foundation of tourism’s recovery.”

A critical juncture for tourism

Tourism’s contribution to GDP and foreign exchange earnings underlines its strategic importance to Sri Lanka’s economic recovery. Yet, as the NHRDC cautions, growth will be unsustainable without a skilled and stable workforce.

The sector’s competitiveness will depend on reforms that close skills gaps, improve talent retention, and expand workforce participation. With demand forecast to rise sharply in coming years, the challenge is not merely to attract tourists, but to ensure that those who serve them are adequately trained, motivated, and retained.

For Sri Lanka, retaining and developing talent is no longer a secondary issue, it is the missing link that will determine whether tourism can truly drive the country’s recovery.

(The writer is an Economist at The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce.)