The Great Stay

On 22 June 2026, the BBC World Service program The Global Story asked a deceptively simple question — why aren’t more people quitting their jobs? For an industry built on people who serve people, the answer matters more than almost any rate sheet. Here is the read-across, and the eighteen months ahead.

IN ONE BREATH
Your quit rate has fallen. Do not celebrate. It has fallen because people are afraid to move, not because they are glad to stay — and disengagement is climbing underneath the calm.

1.  The signal — what the recording actually said

The premise of the broadcast was the reversal of a story we all lived through. During the pandemic, for the first time in most working memories, the balance of power tilted from the employer to the employee. By 2021, Americans were quitting in record numbers, confident that something better was a phone call away. Anthony Klotz, a professor of organizational behavior at University College London, gave that moment its name: the Great Resignation. Five years on, the tide has gone out. People are staying put — if they are fortunate enough to hold a job at all. Sarah O’Connor of the Financial Times calls the new mood the Great Hunkering Down: people clinging on not out of loyalty but out of fear. We will use a plainer label for the same thing — the Great Stay.

Klotz traced the original wave to three forces stacked on top of one another: acute pandemic stress, a wave of “pandemic epiphanies” as people reassessed how they wanted to live, and the great unbundling of work from place. Crucially, 2020 itself was a terrible year for quitting — everyone hunkered down — so a backlog of intentions built up and was released the moment vaccines arrived, and the economy reopened. Employers were not ready.

O’Connor added the colder, cyclical truth a labor economist never forgets: worker power tracks the macro-economy. When the economy runs hot, people quit; when it cools, they cling on. In 2021, the economy ran very hot indeed, and for a brief window, staff held leverage they had not enjoyed since the financial crisis. Employers competed with perks — bring the dog to the office, free coffee, free lunch. That window has closed. The perks are being clawed back, return-to-office mandates are the order of the day, and the power has swung firmly back to the employer.

Two reported portraits did the heavy lifting. A lorry driver, classified as a key worker, drove himself to collapse during the delivery boom — relaxed driving-hour rules made the shifts longer — until he pulled over at a hospital, was treated for exhaustion, and walked away from the job for good. And a brand-new Amazon warehouse where the workers no longer walk the aisles: robots bring the shelving to a person who now stands in one place. Easier on the body, the company says, with fewer injuries. More intense, more boring, and — in the workers’ own telling — more like being a robot themselves.

The hosts closed on the human core of it. A long-running survey shows that roughly seven in ten people say they would keep working even if they never needed the money again. Ask the sharper question — would you keep this job — and the hands drop to about one in ten. That gap, between our appetite for work and the version of work we are actually handed, is the whole story. It is also precisely a hospitality problem.

2.  The state of the nation — hospitality’s read-across

No sector rode the Great Resignation harder than ours. Hospitality has always carried the highest churn of any major industry, and in 2021–22 it hemorrhaged people — to logistics, to gig platforms, to anywhere that paid more and asked less of the soul. Then the cycle turned, and hospitality is now living its own Great Stay. Rotas are full. Notice periods are quiet. On the operations dashboard, labor looks, for once, stable.

It is not stable. It is frozen. The same two forces identified by the broadcast are pinning hospitality workers in place. The macro picture across many of our markets is soft, so fewer alternative jobs beckon. And a thick fog of AI uncertainty hangs over every desk and back office, so people sense a wave of change coming and decide this is no moment to jump. Low turnover in 2026 is not a vote of confidence. It is a held breath.

Here is the trap an owner-operator can walk straight into. Turnover is a lagging, flattering number. It tells you who has already left, not who has already checked out. Underneath the calm, engagement is sliding — and in our business, unlike a warehouse, engagement is not a wellbeing nicety. It is the product. A disengaged forklift driver still moves the pallet. A disengaged front-desk agent, concierge, or server quietly removes the very thing the guest is paying a premium for: discretionary warmth. The shortfall does not show up in the churn report. It shows up in the review score, the second-stay rate, and the rate you can command next season.

THE OWNER’S BLIND SPOT
Falling turnover plus falling engagement is not stability — it is stored flight risk and a degrading guest product, arriving on the same balance sheet.

3.  The problems, named plainly

A.  DISENGAGEMENT WEARING THE MASK OF STABILITY

The held breath will be released. When the macro thaws or the AI fog lifts, the stored intentions convert to resignations — a delayed wave that lands on whoever mistook inertia for loyalty. Gallup’s engagement data, which Klotz cites, already shows disengagement at its highest level since 2020. The bill is deferred, not canceled.

B.  THE SINGLE-EVENT TRIGGER

Klotz’s research splits quitting roughly in half: a slow drift of dissatisfaction, and a single galvanizing event — a shock, large or small, that flips someone from autopilot to the exit. Hospitality manufactures those shocks daily. One abusive guest left unsupported, one rota injustice, one manager’s thoughtless line at the end of a double shift. In a frozen market, the trigger is suppressed; in a thawing one, it is lethal.

C.  A PEOPLE BUSINESS AUTOMATING ITS FRONT DOOR

The most recent use of AI in the recording was hiring — graduates recorded answering questions to a camera, judged for advancement by a machine, in a process applicants found frankly dehumanizing. Hospitality is sprinting in the same direction: AI screening, video assessment, automated rejection. There is a particular irony in using a cold algorithm to select for human warmth, and then wondering why the warmth is in short supply. We are also feeding an arms race — employers screen with AI, candidates apply with AI — that makes the whole ritual worse for everyone.

D.  ROBOTS THAT HOLLOW OUT THE CRAFT

The Amazon warehouse is the warning, not the model. Bringing the work to a stationary human can spare the body, yet still break the spirit if the result is more intense, more repetitive, and more robotic. Drop the same logic carelessly into back-of-house — automated runners, robotic dish pits, conveyor housekeeping — and you risk trading injuries for tedium, and tedium is its own kind of turnover.

E.  THE VANISHING BOTTOM RUNG

O’Connor’s sharpest point about our industry concerned entry-level work. In law, accountancy, and banking, the junior grind was miserable — and it was also the apprenticeship that built the senior. AI now handles much of that grunt work, so the temptation is to hire fewer junior hires. Hospitality’s equivalent rungs — the reservations desk, the night audit, the revenue junior, the management trainee logging guest histories — are exactly the tasks AI absorbs first. Cut them without thought, and you are not trimming costs. You are quietly canceling your 2031 general managers.

F.  SPENDING ON AUTOMATION WITHOUT REDESIGNING THE WORK

Every robot and every AI agent carries a running cost, and a guest-facing AI estate consumes tokens by the million. Deployed on top of an un-redesigned process, automation adds cost on top of cost — capex and consumption with no lift in the experience. This is precisely why Pertlink proposes tracking Token Cost Per Guest (TCPG): to measure spend against the experience it buys, not just the headcount it removes.

4.  What needs to be done

None of this counsels despair, and none of it counsels switching the machines off. It counsels design. Seven moves, in rough order of urgency:

• Measure the held breath, not just the exits. Put an engagement pulse alongside the turnover report and weight it more heavily. Track quiet-quitting signals — discretionary effort, internal mobility, sick-day creep — as leading indicators of a wave you can still get ahead of.

• Re-humanize the front door. Use AI to schedule, summarize, and reduce drudgery in hiring; keep a human in the room for judgment. For a business that sells human warmth, the recruiting experience is the first guest experience an employee ever has. Make it feel like the brand.

• Redesign the bottom rung around AI — do not delete it. Let AI take the grunt work and re-point juniors at what the machine cannot do: reading a room, recovering a ruined evening, exercising taste. This is the heart of the Pertlink envisioned Human Experience Orchestrator (HXO) — the elevated front-line role where a person conducts a stack of AI and robotic tools rather than competing with them. Protect the apprenticeship; modernize the curriculum.

• Robots to the back, humans to the front. The Hybrid Hospitality Framework is a placement discipline: automate the toil, the risk, and the unseen logistics; never automate the moment the guest comes for. Where you do bring the work to the human, design against the Amazon failure mode — build in variety, autonomy, and pace control so the job is lighter on the body without being heavier on the soul.

• Install shock absorbers. Klotz’s most quietly radical advice was that most regretted quits were avoidable. He tells of someone on the brink of leaving who escaped a toxic colleague simply by spotting an empty room and asking to move into it. Train managers to surface the real grievance and fix the fixable before it becomes a single galvanizing event. Make speaking up cheaper than walking out.

• Build the boomerang. Returning is increasingly normal, and hospitality is seasonal and cyclical by nature. Run a proper alumni program, part on good terms, and keep the door open. Your best future hire is often a good past leaver.

• Raise AI literacy across the whole workforce. Much of the fog that freezes people is not understanding what is coming for their role. Teach it. People who grasp the tools become — in Klotz’s phrase from the broadcast — responsible consumers of AI rather than its anxious subjects. AI Literacy is the cheapest lever for retention and engagement you are not yet pulling.

THE DISCIPLINE UNDERNEATH
Govern the spend as you scale the machines. Hold every automation and AI deployment to a Token Cost Per Guest test — experience uplift per unit of spend — so the estate stays accountable to the guest, not just to the cost line.

5.  The next eighteen months — robots and AI

A forecast, bounded and specific, from now to the back end of 2027. It comes in three phases, and the window to act is the first one, while the surface still looks calm.

Phase 1 — The Stay holds (now to Q4 2026)

Quit rates remain low while disengagement continues to climb; the gap between them widens. Back-of-house robotics graduate from novelty to live pilot in well-defined niches — food runners, robotic dishwashing, autonomous floor cleaning, inventory, and stockroom logistics. AI agents quietly take over the reservations inbox, tier-one guest messaging, and the first pass of revenue work. To an owner who reads only the labor dashboard, everything looks fine. This is the moment of maximum danger and maximum opportunity: the cheapest time to fix engagement and redesign roles is precisely while nobody appears to be leaving.

Phase 2 — The thaw (Q4 2026 to mid-2027)

As the macro picture steadies and the worst AI fears fail to materialize, confidence returns, and the stored intentions begin to be realized. Expect a delayed churn wave concentrated among your most able and most mobile people — the very staff who were too cautious to move in 2026. Robotics crosses from pilot to standard in the proven niches. The human role is visibly concentrated on orchestration, empathy, and recovery: fewer hands on rote tasks, more judgment at the points that matter. Properties that spent Phase 1 on HXO redesign keep their people. Those who merely cut headcount discover what they actually cut.

Phase 3 — The reckoning (mid to late 2027)

The pipeline decisions made in 2025–26 come due. Operators who deleted the bottom rung find no seasoned juniors ready to step up, and a thin bench where their next leaders should be. On the guest side, as travelers meet AI and robots at more and more touchpoints, verified human contact becomes a priced premium rather than a default — a positioning, not a slogan. And as automation capex compounds, TCPG moves from a Pertlink coinage to a line owners actually ask about, with a serious case for its place alongside the established USALI measures.

THE SHAPE OF IT
Robots and AI will not empty your hotel of people. They will change which people, doing what, and at which moments — and they will reward, richly, the operators who decide that on purpose rather than by drift.

6.  The Pertlink view

The lorry driver in the recording ultimately did not want to stop working. He wanted to stop working that way. He found his footing tending neglected graves — photographing them for strangers tracing an ancestor, then quietly restoring the ones that had fallen into disrepair. Peaceful, outdoors, a small treasure hunt with meaning; he even set his ringtone to church bells so a call would never break the quiet. He said he wished he had done it ten years sooner. That is the seven-in-ten and the one-in-ten in a single life. People want to work. They do not want the version of work we too often hand them.

Hospitality has been handed a strange gift: a pause. The Great Stay has bought our industry a quiet window in which the people have not yet left, the robots are not yet fully arrived, and the future is still ours to design. Spend that window measuring engagement rather than admiring low turnover, redesigning the bottom rung rather than deleting it, and placing the machines where they spare the body without stealing the meaning. Do that, and the next eighteen months become an advantage rather than an ambush.

The intelligence may be artificial. But the experience is human.

Made with the help of various AI tools, but with a HITL

ABOUT THIS PAPER

A Pertlink viewpoint synthesizing the 22 June 2026 edition of The Global Story (BBC World Service), in which Anthony Klotz — professor of organizational behavior at University College London and author of Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters — and Sarah O’Connor, Financial Times columnist and author of We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work, discuss the reversal of the Great Resignation into what O’Connor calls the Great Hunkering Down. Pertlink frames the same phenomenon as the Great Stay and reads it across to travel, tourism, and hospitality. Frameworks referenced — the Human Experience Orchestrator (HXO), the Hybrid Hospitality Framework, AI Literacy, and Token Cost Per Guest (TCPG) — are proprietary to Pertlink. The broadcast is summarised and interpreted; no portion is reproduced.

Pertlink Limited  ·  Hospitality Technology & AI Consultancy