This is the fourth in a series of five posts exploring what 170 tourism SMEs across Europe reported in RESKILL survey about skills, training, and the future of work in hospitality.
Ask any tourism business owner why they don’t train their staff more, and you might expect to hear about budgets. Training costs money. Small businesses have tight margins. The economics don’t work.
That’s not what we heard.
The Real Barrier
When we surveyed 170 tourism SMEs across six European countries about obstacles to workforce training, one answer dominated:
Time constraints: 89 mentions
Cost came second with 47 mentions — roughly half as often. Other barriers included lack of motivation (31), difficulty accessing funding (28), seasonality challenges (24), and high staff turnover (21).
The pattern is clear. It’s not that employers can’t afford to train. It’s that they can’t afford to stop.
The Operational Reality
Think about what training typically means for a small hotel or restaurant. You need to pull staff off the floor. Someone has to cover their shifts. Service quality might dip. In peak season, it’s unthinkable. In low season, you’ve already cut hours.
Traditional training formats assume time that these businesses simply don’t have. A two-day workshop. A week-long course. Even a half-day seminar means reshuffling rotas and hoping nothing goes wrong.
The result? Over half the businesses we surveyed (53%) provide only occasional training or none at all. Not because they don’t see the value. Because the operational maths doesn’t add up.
Training That Fits vs Training That Doesn’t
This isn’t a motivation problem. Employers told us they want workers with better skills — that was the whole point of the talent crisis we explored in Post 1. They know training matters.
The disconnect is between what they need and what’s typically on offer.
Traditional training is built for contexts where time is available: students in education, employees in large organisations with cover systems, professionals in roles that allow time away from delivery.
Small tourism businesses operate differently. The receptionist can’t pause check-ins to watch a webinar. The chef can’t leave the kitchen for a workshop. The tour guide can’t cancel bookings for a training day.
If training doesn’t fit into the cracks of a working day, it doesn’t happen.
Why This Matters Now
Once again, context matters: these aren’t struggling businesses looking for excuses.
Over half the businesses we surveyed (53%) have fully recovered or are actively growing post-pandemic. They’re trying to expand. They’re hitting skills constraints. They want to develop their people.
But growth makes the time trap worse, not better. More customers means more pressure on operations. Less slack in the system. Fewer opportunities to pause.
The busier you get, the harder it becomes to invest in the capabilities that would help you handle the busyness.
Rethinking the Format
The question isn’t whether tourism businesses should train their staff. It’s what training looks like when time is the scarcest resource.
This is where RESKILL starts.
We’re exploring how to deliver learning designed for operational reality: short modules that fit into quiet moments, practical content that applies immediately, formats that don’t require pulling people off the floor.
But content alone isn’t enough. We’re also looking at mentorship, tutoring, and peer-to-peer support — ways to develop people that don’t depend on formal training time. A quick conversation with an experienced colleague. Guidance from someone who’s already figured it out. Learning that happens in the flow of work, not despite it.
Not because micro-learning is trendy. Because for these businesses, it might be the only thing that works.
The goal isn’t to replace deeper learning. It’s to make development possible for businesses where traditional formats have failed.
Meeting employers where they are. Working with the constraints, not against them.
Next in this series: What This Means: The RESKILL Response — bringing together the insights from across the series and showing how RESKILL is designed to address them.
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The RESKILL project (Reskill Revolution: Pioneering Change in Adult Education) is co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ programme. Survey data with responses from tourism SMEs in Finland, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Spain.
