Check In to Stand Out: Why a Career in Hospitality Increasingly Makes Sense

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In an increasingly competitive labour market, with entry-level opportunities narrowing across many parts of the economy, hospitality remains one of the few major global industries that still offers young professionals a viable route into meaningful long-term careers, and that is worth serious reflection. In this article, I argue against the long-standing stigma surrounding hospitality work, which undervalues the profession and understates the vast opportunities the industry still offers. Importantly, this dated view of the profession is increasingly difficult to defend in a modern marketplace where technology is rapidly evolving and reshaping the reality faced by recent graduates seeking employment. Across much of the economy, technological advances, especially in artificial intelligence (AI), are automating many of the routine tasks through which young professionals traditionally embarked on their careers. In the hospitality industry, however, the evidence suggests that this growing use of technology has thus far been less disruptive, with AI tending to augment human service delivery rather than replacing it. When considered alongside the industry's relatively accessible entry-level pathways and the career paths they can lead to, this enduring need for people increasingly represents a genuine advantage for young professionals who are prepared to seize it. Realising that advantage, however, also depends on educators preparing them effectively and employers recognising and rewarding those who take it seriously and demonstrate that they are putting in the effort. The work is demanding and I do not shy away from this fact. The hours are long, the start is humble and the pay is initially modest. However, for those who commit to it, there has rarely been a better time to 'check in'.

INTRODUCTION

Growing up in Switzerland, I often heard the proverb "Wer nichts wird, wird Wirt", loosely translated as "those who amount to nothing end up as innkeepers". It is a cynical play on words that devalues hospitality work by implying that it requires no unique skills or education, and I find it ironic that this mindset persists in a country globally renowned for its hospitality excellence. As the homophonic wordplay of ‘wird’ (becomes) and ‘Wirt’ (innkeeper) does not translate well, it is a saying confined to the German-speaking realm, yet it reflects what I believe to be a more widely held dismissive perception of the profession. In this article, I argue that this mindset misrepresents a dynamic and rewarding profession by reducing it to an undesirable last resort. It also blurs the crucial distinction between those seeking easily attainable stopgap employment and those passionately building serious hospitality careers. Most problematically for an industry whose continued competitive advantage depends on in-person service delivery, this attitude risks deterring the ambitious and capable young professionals it relies on, who, faced with multiple career options, may shy away from making hospitality their first choice. 

Hospitality has, in my view, long been a strong career choice for those prepared to take it seriously. However, particularly in its early stages, the nature of the work burdens the profession with a perception of lower status. I believe this is due to two main reasons. First, in fields considered more prestigious, the tasks that make up the role of a young employee at this stage of their career are not so easily observable by the general public, and second, they bear little resemblance to what the profession is understood to be in the long term. Consider a young professional who has just started working at a prestigious law firm and how this is perceived by their family, friends and society more broadly, and then compare it to how starting a new position at a luxury hotel chain would be perceived instead.

Essentially, much of the work done by recent graduates, regardless of the industry, is relatively mundane. However, a successful lawyer and a successful hotelier would likely both be perceived as having attained a comparable professional status. The inherent problem, as I see it, is the mismatch between how a hospitality career is perceived in its early stages and where it may ultimately lead. A young person deciding what to do professionally is likely to be influenced much more by the former than the latter. Considering the impact recent technological advances, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), are currently having on the labour market, let’s not make decisions about tomorrow's economy based on yesterday's ideals.

It is not possible to predict exactly how AI will affect the economy in the coming years, let alone what any profession will look like ten years from now. The best we can do is make informed judgements based on what the technology is already capable of doing, and young graduates now entering the workplace already face the difficult reality that securing their first position is much harder than they expected based on what they were told by those who came up in a different era. Returning to the comparison between the young lawyer and the young hotelier, there is an instructive difference worth pointing out. In the case of the lawyer, many of the routine tasks that have traditionally made up junior legal work, including research, document review and the drafting of standard contracts, can already be automated or substantially facilitated by AI. Law firms will undoubtedly adapt and continue to recruit, but if fewer junior lawyers are needed for law firms to deliver a comparable service, entry into the profession will become more competitive by definition. Technological advances will undoubtedly also have a significant impact on the hospitality industry, and what this will ultimately mean is also not something we can predict with any certainty. For now, however, we can say with greater confidence that the young hotelier is in a different position, as many of the tasks performed at the start of a hospitality career still require an element of physical presence and interpersonal interaction that AI cannot yet credibly replace. So, although we may not know exactly how either profession will evolve, we can make a reasoned judgement by considering how exposed to automation the tasks required to enter each profession currently are and how likely AI is to automate aspects of the profession in the long term.

Drawing on my early years working in the industry and over a decade of researching and teaching within the field, I aim in this article to reframe hospitality careers within the context of this changing labour market. I address my argument to the young professionals at the start of their careers, to the educators who guide and inspire them, and to the industry leaders who will hire them. Each of these stakeholders has their own motivations, but as their success is interdependent, each also carries obligations to the others. Ultimately, we cannot influence the broader forces reshaping the labour market. However, we can adapt to them and work together to make the most of the opportunities they present.

There’s never been a better time to build that hotel related career than there is right now.

Chip Rogers, Former President and CEO, American Hotel and Lodging Association (2023)

THE SHIFT TOWARDS SERVICES

As economies develop, a consistent structural shift can be observed in the composition of economic activity and employment. Economies tend to move from agriculture to manufacturing and then increasingly towards services, which come to account for a progressively larger share of both GDP and employment. Today, the service sector accounts for the majority of employment and economic activity in most developed countries. Services represented 63.3% of global GDP in 2024 and by 2025 employed over half of the world's workforce. In the United States, service-providing roles outnumbered goods-producing roles by more than six to one in 2023, while services accounted for approximately 80% of employment in high-income economies, including much of Western Europe, Canada and Australia. The long-term direction of this shift is best illustrated by the employment data of the United States, shown in Figure 1 below.

The same transition is now unfolding across much of the developing world, often more rapidly as connectivity expands, urbanisation continues and a growing middle class drives demand for services. This is particularly evident across Asia, where services have absorbed more of the workers leaving agriculture than manufacturing has, and where the share of employment in services has doubled over the past three decades. Much of this growth is occurring in modern, increasingly tradable services such as finance, information and communication technology, and business outsourcing, while digitally delivered services are projected to sustain strong growth over the coming years. This long-established trend is therefore not slowing, and in many developing economies it is accelerating. However, it is now doing so alongside the rapid rise of AI, a newly introduced disruptive element beginning to reshape the foundation of the service economy itself.

We went from agriculture to manufacturing, and now we are going from manufacturing to a service sector economy.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Winner and Professor at Columbia University (2003)

HOSPITALITY’S HUMAN MOAT

Businesses fall broadly into two categories, those based on manufacturing products and those based on delivering services. The service category is defined by four key underlying characteristics: intangibility, inseparability, perishability and variability. Services are intangible because what is purchased is primarily an experience, expertise or an outcome rather than a physical object; inseparable because production and consumption often occur at the same time; perishable because unused service capacity cannot simply be stored as inventory for later sale; and variable because their quality can differ depending on who delivers them and the circumstances in which they take place. However, to understand how the reliably predictable macroeconomic shift to services outlined above is taking a new form due to recent technological disruption, a further distinction within the service category becomes increasingly pertinent.

Specifically, there is a distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ services. The line is not perfectly clean, as the four characteristics can remain present to different degrees in both, but it lies in the extent to which they apply. Consider the hard service of accountancy, where the expertise being provided is largely intangible and an accountant’s unused capacity today cannot simply be stored and sold tomorrow. In terms of variability, the service also retains a relatively consistent delivery resulting from regulation, established processes and industry standards. However, in terms of inseparability, there is a line separating production and consumption, as much of the work can be completed without the client present. A different example of a hard service is software development, where the development itself is a service produced without the user present, but perishability and variability are less consequential as the resulting software can be reproduced, stored and distributed repeatedly without recreating the original service each time. Accountancy and software development are both services, but the four service characteristics apply to each only partially, and they are consequently defined as hard services.

Conversely, hospitality represents a particularly pure form of a soft service, defined by all four service characteristics equally. The experience itself is intangible, an unsold hotel room or empty restaurant table is perishable, and the quality of delivery inevitably varies according to the people and circumstances involved. Most importantly, production and consumption remain closely connected, as the service has to be delivered in person and in the moment, with the guest participating directly in the service encounter.

The rapid development of AI makes this distinction between hard and soft services increasingly consequential for young professionals. Although growth in the service sector of an economy is closely tied to its level of development, which may earlier have implied that a service career was a secure one, the unprecedented growth of AI-enabled automation adds nuance worth noting. The more readily a service can be separated from the customer, standardised and converted into repeatable processes, the greater the scope becomes for AI to substitute parts of its delivery. In other words, not all services are the same and some are more likely to require human delivery.

The implications of this are beginning to emerge in the labour market, with Stanford researchers analysing payroll records from millions of American workers, finding that employment among workers aged 22 to 25 in occupations most exposed to AI was around 19% below the level suggested by employment trends in less-exposed occupations. Importantly, the effect appears to be driven primarily by reduced hiring rather than redundancies, making it particularly relevant to those trying to enter the workforce. The researchers were deliberately careful in how they worded their findings, describing them as an early signal rather than proof of economy-wide displacement. That caveat is important from a research perspective, but the implications are nevertheless difficult to ignore and although this doesn’t mean that hospitality is completely insulated from AI automation, it is not having the same effect as it is elsewhere. Instead of eliminating roles outright, it is enabling new opportunities that facilitate some aspects of the service delivery. In other words, the technology that has proven disruptive in other industries has thus far mainly been shown to augment the human role in hospitality, rather than making it obsolete.

Practical examples of this include AI agents and mobile check-in, which can handle routine enquiries, while kitchen displays, live room status and sensor alerts improve coordination behind the scenes. This gives employees more time for exceptions, recognition, service recovery and the human interactions that guests value, remember and are willing to pay for. Of course, the outcome depends on how the technology is deployed. Hospitality has every reason to embrace technologies that improve efficiency and support the service encounter. Used well, they enable the high-tech, high-touch blend the industry keeps trying to achieve, whereas indiscriminately removing people from the guest experience risks weakening the very service being sold.

Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel.

Danny Meyer, founder of Union Square Hospitality Group (2006)

Ultimately, the data speaks for itself. Travel and tourism, the wider ecosystem within which hospitality sits, remains one of the largest job markets worldwide. It supported 366 million jobs in 2025, one in every nine worldwide, with the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) forecasting this number to rise to 376 million in 2026. The WTTC expects travel and tourism to generate 91 million new jobs by 2035, around one in every three net new jobs globally, while facing a projected shortfall of 43 million workers, as illustrated in Figure 2 below.

At its core, hospitality is the disciplined human craft of creating experiences that make other people feel welcomed, valued and remembered. It demands emotional intelligence, cultural awareness and polished interpersonal skill as baseline expectations, alongside empathy, operational precision and composure under pressure. Frontline roles such as receptionists, waitstaff and housekeepers will undoubtedly remain a critical part of the industry, and although the complexity, dedication and artistry required to perform them well are easy to overlook from the outside, they are not as easily automated, at least not yet.

We are in the business of people serving people. Technology will just enable better service.

Kevin Jacobs, CFO, Hilton Hotels & Resorts (2022)

FROM ON-RAMP TO PAYOFF

One oft-cited characteristic of hospitality work is its relatively low barriers to entry, a factor that has contributed, in part, to the misconception that the work itself is easy or that anyone can do it. This is an understandable position to take when considering the implied triviality that an industry that is relatively easy to enter is also one that is relatively easy to exit. In fact, it's not disputed that hospitality's high turnover rate remains a genuine and enduring challenge for the industry. However, it is also true that people enter and exit the industry for very different reasons, and one key distinction that makes it possible to classify them into two groups is their motivation for doing so. The first group sees it as easily attainable employment when they have no other choice and they are likely to leave when they are able to. This is legitimate and is not going to change any time soon, as the industry's need for people remains strong. For example, the American Hotel & Lodging Association Foundation projected in 2024 that the US hotel industry will see 12% job growth over the following five years (to 2029), against 8% for the economy overall. The other group, however, views the opportunity more broadly than immediate employment and makes hospitality their first choice because of it, and is less likely to just leave for a 'better' opportunity. At a time when entry into other professions is becoming increasingly uncertain, the continued ability to get a foot in the door has a value of its own that should not be underestimated.

It is also important to remember that the initial stages of a hospitality career do not represent the profession as a whole. Those who recognise this early are better able to value the accessible entry for how it enables their long-term career aspirations and to view entry-level work as a stepping stone that can lead to a respectable and rewarding career. This is a view supported by a 2016 industry survey, which reported that more than half of hotel corporate executives and general managers began their careers in hourly entry-level positions. Within hotels alone, careers extend from operations and general management into revenue optimisation, distribution, brand management, customer experience and sustainability. More broadly, the wider sector adds opportunities in MICE, food and beverage, destination planning and policy, alongside adjacent industries such as travel, transport and online travel agencies. Moreover, careers can span brands, markets and countries, with an international mobility that is rare at the entry level in other professions. Finally, the industry's breadth also creates a vast range of opportunities for entrepreneurship, whether directly, by becoming a ‘Wirt’, or by building a business in the myriad of support services the industry relies on.

Importantly, hospitality work, especially at the early stages, develops not only the capabilities on which later managerial roles within the industry depend, but also an understanding of what it means to effectively deliver a service. Even for those who later decide to leave the industry entirely, the time spent is not wasted. It is a valuable foundation of experience wherever a career may lead, from reading people and communicating across cultures to remaining calm under pressure and learning how to satisfy a customer by solving problems in real time. As my father once put it, "if you are not sure about what you want to do now, hospitality is not a bad option, as it develops practical skills that apply well to any professional setting". He said it in German of course, but that was his advice when I was unsure about what to do and asked him for guidance.

Hospitality is a life skill as well as a career. Even if you are not sure that you want to spend your full career in the industry, having an apprenticeship in the sector will give you invaluable work and life skills that are transferrable to almost all jobs.

Anne Harvey, Learning Manager, Jurys Inn and Leonardo Hotels (2022)

Personally, I look back fondly on my first exposure to the industry as a bellhop at the Millennium Hotel in Rotorua, New Zealand, where, at sixteen, I spent weekends and school holidays greeting guests, carrying their bags and making them feel welcomed. After high school, I enrolled at the Pacific International Hotel Management School in New Plymouth, New Zealand and during my internships, I worked as a commis at the Mont Cervin Palace in Zermatt, Switzerland, and as a concierge at the Miraflores Park Hotel in Lima, Peru. These experiences were formative and character-building in ways that continue to shape my perspective on work to this day. My own career has since moved away from hotel operations, but it still revolves around the industry. Hospitality remains the focus of my research, provides much of the context for what I teach and is the industry in which I built a business. My path is not the typical outcome, I certainly did not expect to become a professor, but that is the point, because the rich opportunities still available to this generation are difficult to foresee at the start.

WORKING TOGETHER, EVERYONE BENEFITS

In the preceding sections, I have examined how the unique traits of the hospitality industry intersect with shifting macroeconomic trends and how this is increasingly impacted by the unexpectedly rapid advancement of technologies like AI. What follows is just my opinion, based on my background and my reading of current events. I address, in turn, the three stakeholders whose success I believe is intertwined, so while each note stands on its own, they are best read together. Basically, everyone has a role to play, and everyone benefits if each plays it.

A Note to Students

For my younger readers, I want to emphasise that no one really knows how your chosen profession will be impacted by technologies like AI in the long term. It is an unprecedented disruption to the human element in the economy. The best you can do is to base your decisions on what you can already see happening. One conclusion you can reliably draw at this stage is that hospitality continues to depend heavily on people and continues to recruit new talent, while other industries are reducing their hiring rates and increasing their redundancies. At the very least, you can make an informed judgement based on how exposed to automation the tasks that make up the work currently are, and by that measure, how comparatively secure the profession is.

I should be clear that hospitality is not an easy career path. If 'work-life balance' is important to you, this industry is not the right choice. You will work long hours, weekends and public holidays, early mornings, late nights, and probably also split shifts, which I personally enjoyed least. You will interact with people during some of their best moments, and you will be an integral part of that experience, which can be genuinely rewarding. However, that also comes at the cost of having to maintain composure while appeasing people at their worst. Every profession has its pros and cons, and hospitality work is demanding, and your success is directly tied to how much effort you put in and how resilient you are. However, the demands placed on you, and the interpersonal skills you'll consequently hone, are also the very things that AI cannot yet replicate, so if you think you are up to the challenge, the same qualities that make the work hard are also what make your future comparatively secure. Ultimately, none of this is a guarantee, and you may well decide on a different path later. But the time you invest in these early stages need not be wasted either way. There are things you can't learn conceptually, things that only practical exposure can teach, and frontline hospitality work provides that exposure on a daily basis. So, even if the market changes or you decide to take a different path, what you will have learned is transferable to almost any professional setting and, more broadly, it is also character-building.

None of us chose the labour market we are entering; we just have to play the hand we are dealt, and with everything considered, I think when it comes to a career in hospitality, the right move is to double down. Moreover, this challenge, if you are willing to accept it, brings another advantage beyond job security. If you see the advantages and are prepared to work hard, you are the type of person the industry continues to need, and that gives you some bargaining power. Therefore, be cognisant of the value you bring and choose your employer carefully. During your recruitment, remember that you are interviewing the organisation as much as they are interviewing you. You should not have unrealistic expectations about pay, titles, or immediate promotion, but you would be well placed to ensure that strong performance will be recognised in the organisation you consider entering, that you will have the opportunity to learn from capable leaders and finally, that there is a credible path forward if you earn it.

An Educator’s Perspective

To my fellow educators, I know that we all have our own pedagogical approaches, and many of you have more experience than I do. I write this not as a prescription, but simply to share my own observations. Part of our role is to give students a fair and realistic view of the careers for which we are preparing them. There is no reason to sugar-coat the work or create false expectations. However, we are also well placed to provide context for the negative perceptions that surround the industry, and there is even less reason to shy away from highlighting its genuine advantages, especially in this rapidly changing market. Naturally, that judgement is grounded in our own expertise and research, but due to the new dynamism we are observing, we also need to keep abreast of the latest trends. Our continuing ties with the industry are a good starting point for assessing what employers actually need from our graduates today, while our own reading of where the industry appears to be heading helps us consider what they may need next. Staying up to date on both fronts is, in my view, part of the job if the competencies we cultivate in our students are to remain applicable in practice upon their graduation.

Ultimately, tertiary education is about students developing more robust thought patterns. While there is value in what the students learn, some of it will inevitably be forgotten and much of it may not be directly applicable. However, the ability to learn and to approach problems at a higher level of conceptual thought should be the key skill that remains. Regardless of any module's specific focus, the projects we set generally aim to develop this broader ability to think strategically. The obvious issue this presents is the temporal mismatch between what we teach and the tasks that make up their early job descriptions. In other words, upon graduation, the students may understand how to think strategically about managerial-level issues, but in their first frontline positions it is generally not a daily consideration, and they would likely not be taken seriously if they tried to voice it anyway.

When it comes to the impact AI is having on education, I see a serious disconnect between how fast the technology is evolving and the much slower evolution of our assessments. We cannot realistically ban the use of AI, nor should we want to. Effective prompt engineering is a skill that has real value in today's world and, let's face it, students will use these tools anyway, so arbitrarily restricting them makes little sense. This means that we need to think carefully about how we adjust our assessments so that AI does not undermine our broader goal of developing thoughtful and competitive graduates. If we just set written projects that require the subject-specific application of strategic thinking, a task now easily completed by large language models (LLMs), how do we know that the thinking is really theirs? If students outsource their thinking to an LLM, in the short term it is just an easy fix for a good grade.

In the long term, however, it weakens the very capabilities their education was intended to develop. This is why I think we need to be particularly careful about whether we are really still testing our students' higher-order strategic thinking. Written projects tested it appropriately in our pre-AI education, but a final product that looks the same as ours did no longer guarantees that the same level of thought went into producing it.

A Suggestion to the Industry

To the industry leaders who will hire my students, I think you'll agree with my advice that the generation entering the market should appreciate the opportunities the industry continues to offer and put in the work accordingly. However, I would also say it's fair that, if they hold up their end of the bargain, the industry would be remiss not to meet them halfway. It is the human element, the person who translates your brand's service offering into the guest's experience, that remains the key to your competitive advantage, and it is worth keeping this in mind when considering how you treat the young talent that chooses to work for you. You do not need to be soft on them. Don't be; push them. You also do not need to reward them for anything they have not earned. At a minimum, set clear expectations for them and let their performance determine how you respond. When a young employee demonstrates ability, passion and a willingness to take on greater responsibility, all you need to do is recognise it and reward it. When considering recruitment and training costs arising from turnover, along with the lost revenue from poor service delivery, it makes sense to re-evaluate the easier short-term cost savings in relation to the potential long-term profitability, even if it is not immediately visible on the balance sheet.

Motivate them, train them, care about them, and make winners out of them, they’ll treat the customers right. And if customers are treated right, they’ll come back.

J. Willard Marriott, Founder of the Marriott Corporation (1957)

The COVID-19 pandemic is a good example of how a short-term strategy can have long-term consequences. I recall speaking with industry insiders at the time who confidently promoted 'job redesign' as a way to continue operating while reducing headcounts and saving costs. The circumstances were exceptional and difficult decisions undoubtedly had to be made, but they showed that labour costs could be reduced far more quickly than new talent could be found once demand returned, and demand recovered much faster than hiring rates did. In the end, the industry was left confronting what came to be called a 'labour crunch', which lasted for many years after everything returned to normal and is arguably still an on-going issue.

It's very painful to find talent post-Covid. There's been a hard shift; people no longer want to spend 10 years working their way up in an organization. Candidates, particularly young ones, are willing to sacrifice on location or comforts to move up or gain novel experiences.

Joss Kent, Executive Chairman and CEO, &Beyond (2024)

Ultimately, the most promising young professionals are likely to have alternatives, and if they cannot see a future with you, they are able to build one somewhere else. Retaining everyone is neither realistic nor necessary, but organisations should be concerned if they consistently lose those who have demonstrated the greatest potential. Those who remain generally have fewer options, which is not the same as commitment; it's resignation and short-term thinking. The fact that they can be easily replaced if needed is cold comfort. Hospitality's low barriers to entry mean there will rarely be a shortage of people willing to deliver your guest-facing services, but filling a position today and finding the right person to fill it for the long-term are not the same thing.

CONCLUSION

I am not sure where all of this is heading, and I am sceptical of anyone who claims to be. What I do know is that the long-standing weaknesses attributed to hospitality work are increasingly presenting as strengths within the context of this modern economy. I do not know how long this will remain true, but for now, the industry needs people, and much of its value proposition still depends on them. If each of the key stakeholders I have addressed holds up their end of the bargain, there is an opportunity here for mutual benefit.

Perhaps it is worth rethinking the proverb I grew up with and changing it to "Wer noch etwas werden will, wird Wirt". In other words, those who still want to make something of themselves will become hoteliers, restaurateurs, hospitality entrepreneurs, or maybe professors. In any case, for the young professionals who are undecided on their career path in this increasingly uncertain labour market, I would argue that...

to stand out, it’s a good time to check in.