Last month, an operator I respect texted me at midnight from somewhere in North Carolina. "Lost another cleaner. Third one this year. What am I doing wrong?" He runs five doors. Three years in. Beautiful properties, design taste that should win every market he's in. And he's drowning.
He's not alone. Key Data's 2026 industry report says 73% of property managers cite staffing as the #1 barrier to hitting this year's goals. Above pricing. Above regulation. Above marketing. The hardest thing in our business right now is keeping good people on your team.
I've been hiring hospitality teams for 10+ years now. Built ops teams in Chile, Mexico, Cape Town, Barcelona, and now in Costa Rica. I've onboarded hundreds of cleaners, maintenance leads, ops managers, and GMs across three continents. And the longer I do this, the more I think most of us are hiring wrong from the very first step.
Here's what I'd say to my friend in North Carolina. And to anyone reading this with the same problem.
Stop hiring for positions. Hire for people who fit the house.
I know this sounds nepotistic, and it is. I've never been as interested in the hard skills someone possesses as I have been in their interest in the job, the industry, and their overall fit with the culture of the companies and teams I have worked with.
You don't need a cleaner. You need someone who, when they're moving through your property at 11am on a Tuesday in shoulder season with their hands full of sheets, sees the warped baseboard you didn't notice and texts you a photo. That isn't a "cleaner." That's a person with judgment who has decided your property is worth caring about. You can't find that person by posting Cleaner Needed on Indeed. You find them by hiring slowly, asking different questions, and being willing to wait an extra month for the right one.
Pay above market. Always.
The math on this is so simple it embarrasses me how few operators run it. If your turnover is 60% in a year, every hire costs you 6-8 weeks of slow turns, lower review scores, training time, your own time, and the recruiting itself. Call it $4,000 in real cost. If paying $5 more an hour drops your turnover from 60% to 15%, you've bought back five hires worth of cost in the first year alone. Above-market pay isn't generosity, it's the cheapest insurance policy in our whole business. The side effect is that you become the operator people don't quit, which means next year's hire is someone your current cleaner recommends from her neighborhood.
Train forever. Not "onboard."
I see U.S. operators talk about "onboarding" like it's a week-long event with a checklist. In Spain, in Cape Town, in the small coastal properties in Costa Rica I used to run, training is a posture. Every Tuesday-morning team meeting is training. Every walkthrough is training. Every guest issue is training. The team gets sharper every quarter not because you sent them to a seminar but because the work itself is the seminar, and the operator is paying attention.
Pura vida is sometimes mistranslated as "no worries." It actually means the pure life. Treat the work like the pure life of your team, and they'll show up like it is.
Make them owners of the outcome, even when they're not.
Tell your cleaner what the review score was this month. Tell your maintenance team what the booking rate looks like. Tell your front-of-house lead what the next quarter's goals are and ask them, out loud, what they would change. When people understand the scoreboard, they play the game. When they don't, they show up and clock out. This isn't a perk. It's the difference between a team that performs and a team that turns over.
The math of fewer, better people.
I have six people on my core Costa Rica team. Six. Across 60+ properties in Guanacaste. Most of the U.S. operators I know running similar door counts have twelve people, half of whom turn over every year. My six don't quit, because they're paid above market, trained constantly, treated like adults, and given real ownership of their work. And the math is honestly better: six well-paid pros at a few dollars above market still cost less than twelve mediocre ones at market plus six rehires.
I'm not telling you anything you don't already know in your gut. I'm telling you that the staffing crisis you're feeling is probably less about a labor market that's broken and more about a hiring philosophy that has to change. The labor market hasn't gotten harder to crack. We've just gotten used to looking for the wrong people in the wrong way.
The next great reservationist on your team isn't on Indeed. She's at the soda down the road from your property, working too many shifts for too little money for an owner who doesn't see her. Go find her. Pay her more than anyone else has. Train her like she's going to run the place one day. She probably will.
Pura vida,
Julia
