For hospitality firms in Southeast Asia, the real race over the next decade won’t be how fast they build hotels, but whether they can staff them.
For U.S.-based Hilton, the challenge is scale. The company opened its 1,000th Asia-Pacific hotel in 2024, backed by a 25% five-year regional compound annual growth rate and a roadmap that includes luxury beach resorts and converted office buildings.
If Hilton wants to meet its growth ambitions, it will need to fill at least 30,000 new roles across the region over the next five years. That’s forced Mary Hogg, senior regional HR director for Southeast Asia, to rethink how Hilton competes for talent.
“We continue to face a talent shortage,” she says. “There is organic growth everywhere, and the whole talent landscape has become increasingly competitive. We’ve had to lean much harder into recruitment marketing to reach people who may not have considered hospitality before.”
Hilton is now trying to argue that hospitality isn’t just a stopgap job for Southeast Asia’s young workers, but can instead be a long-term career. “We want to show them that it’s a multi-faceted career that can grow and change with you. You might start at the front desk and end up creating guest experiences or marketing on the other side of the world. ”
The margin for error is thinner at the boutique luxury end of the market. A single bad opening can damage a brand like Capella Hotel Group, which plans to double its portfolio by 2030, far more than a delayed one.
Scaling an office culture is more about “translation than repetition”, says Richmond Kwok, senior director of human resources, learning and talent development at Capella.
“The challenge is making sure our values are lived meaningfully within each local context rather than a uniformed mandate,” he adds. “Daily lineups, for instance, happen across all properties because they create consistency in how we work but adapts to local nuances.”
Marriott’s talent story, on the other hand, is shaped by conversions and internal movement across a vast existing footprint. In Vietnam and Malaysia, the company is expanding rapidly by reflagging properties and adding dozens of hotels to an already diversified portfolio.
For operators with large footprints, the challenge is persuading people to choose hospitality over other, often less demanding, sectors.
“It’s definitely very competitive,” says Emma Jones, Marriott’s vice president of human resources operations for Asia Pacific (excluding China). Still, she thinks Marriott’s culture is an asset for its regional operations. “We have dedicated country teams and local HR and finance leaders supporting properties from day one and being close to the local situation makes a big difference.”
Jones argues that Marriott has kept its core philosophy constant even as the hotel company approaches its 100th anniversary. “No matter how many properties we have, associates still talk about a family feeling when they work in our hotels.”
In Great Place To Work Certified organisations across Southeast Asia, including Hilton, Capella and Marriott, strong culture is a clear factor in employee retention and growth. Employees who strongly agree they have development opportunities are four times more likely to say they intend to stay long term.
Both Hilton and Marriott invest heavily in education as a long-term strategy. Through partnerships with hotel schools and large-scale internship programs, the company brings tens of thousands of early career workers into their Southeast Asian hotels each year.
For Capella, education is also about local impact. The group’s partnership with EHL Hospitality Business School, launched at Patina Maldives in 2022, offers local Maldivians Swiss-accredited professional certification while they earn and learn on the job. “It’s proof that world-class hospitality education can happen where people live and work,” Kok says.
Like every business, Kok is thinking about automation, who sees AI playing a supportive role in hotels. “We see automation as an enabler of human connection,” he says. “It allows our colleagues to focus on meaningful guest interactions.”
The industry may start to automate more back-of-house operations, yet hotels will still depend on front-line staff that can read a room, calm a crisis, or turn a stay into a story–particularly as younger travelers demand more personalized and experience-driven vacations.
“Even if you end up with hotels that are entirely robot-run,” Hogg says, “you will still need humans to imagine them, and humans to stay there. Hospitality will always be a human business.”
