Future-proofing hospitality: the skill gap dilemma

This ITB Berlin 2026 panel session, moderated by Prof. Dr. Alexander Schmidt (Hotel School The Hague), tackled the hospitality industry's skill gap crisis through three lenses: empirical research, pedagogical innovation, and operational reality. The session opened with a mindfulness moment — asking 500+ attendees to put down phones and make eye contact — to viscerally demonstrate what true hospitality feels like before diagnosing why it is so hard to sustain at scale.

Katerina Shearer (Senior Manager Economic Policy, Booking.com) presented findings from a landmark study of 5,000+ hospitality professionals across Europe — described as the first of its kind at this scale. The central thesis: the skill gap is not a talent problem but a system design problem. Despite 91% of hospitality employees holding full-time roles and 70% planning to stay in the industry for at least five years, there is a profound three-way misalignment between what employers need (digital skills), what employees want (leadership development), and what managers actually prioritize (digital transformation). Only 5.5% of employers prioritize leadership training despite 36% of employees citing it as the primary barrier to career progression. On future-critical skills: 87% of hotels say sustainability will be vital, yet only 16% are implementing sustainability training today; 78% identify sales and marketing as critical, but only 9% prioritize it in training budgets.

Dana Jiménez Herrera (Leadership Lecturer, Hotel School The Hague) challenged the widespread narrative that Generation Z lacks resilience: 'There is no statistical evidence for that. None.' She noted that in the Netherlands, 58% of the hospitality workforce is between 15 and 25 years old. She introduced the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) framework — originally developed to address why humanity is failing to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals — as a systemic approach to building resilience, analytical thinking, and self-awareness. Hotel School The Hague mapped its curriculum against the IDGs in September 2025, launching its first integrated IDG-based course, and found that relevant competencies were already present but fragmented and unaligned.

The panel discussion featured Jan Henningsen (GM, Hotel Berlin Berlin), Matthias Schmid (SVP Accommodations, Booking.com), and Jos Vranken (President, Hotel School The Hague). Henningsen diagnosed the core operational tension: hotel hierarchies have become so lean that junior staff often cover shifts alone with no mentor or feedback loop, turning would-be leaders into task managers. He observed that careers that once took 20 years now take 5, and the accumulated leadership wisdom of slower career paths is being lost. Schmid flagged a structural risk from generative AI: the hollowing out of mid-level roles, leaving only highly operational jobs on one end and deep-thinking jobs on the other, with everything in between 'evaporated.' Booking.com has 12,000 employees and is now shifting from hypergrowth mode to building an internal talent marketplace with lateral as well as vertical career moves. Vranken introduced Hotel School The Hague's educational framework: IQ + EQ + AQ (adversity/agility quotient) + TQ (technological quotient), arguing that companies are increasingly telling schools 'if you don't teach for AI, we won't hire.' He championed the Dutch 'triple helix' model — structured government-industry-education partnerships — as a scalable blueprint, citing 'House of Hospitality' as a working example. The panel closed with each participant naming one hospitality superpower for 2030: Vranken chose 'instilling a sense of fun'; Schmid chose 'holistic understanding of hospitality'; Henningsen chose 'emotional intelligence and critical thinking.'