By Guy Stehlik, Founder and CEO, BON Hotels
I sat on a panel at WTM Africa this week titled “Skills 2030: The Tourism Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet But Should.” It is a provocative title and it sparked a conversation I want to be honest about, because I don’t think we say it loudly enough in this industry. We are not ready.
South Africa’s tourism sector contributes nine percent to GDP. Two million jobs directly and indirectly. Eleven million arrivals in 2025. Seventy five percent of those from the African continent itself. By any measure this is a sector of enormous consequence to this country. Yet when I look at how we are preparing our people for the next four years I find myself genuinely concerned.
Three weeks ago I was at ITB in Berlin. I stayed at a full service, deluxe, 220 bedroom Courtyard by Marriott in the heart of the city. I asked how many permanent staff they employed. Eleven. Eleven permanent people running that entire property. They outsource maintenance. They outsource aspects of housekeeping. They have had absolutely no choice but to completely reimagine what a hotel operation looks like because Europe is in the grip of an acute staffing shortage that forces their hand every single day.
Now come back to South Africa. We have a steady labour supply. Relatively low minimum wages. A hospitality industry that frankly remains pretty poor paying in proportion to other sectors. Because of all of that we have not been forced to adapt the way our European counterparts have been forced to adapt. We have been comfortable. That comfort is building a skills crisis beneath the surface that is going to catch a lot of us off guard.
Our hotel schools, learnerships and many accredited institutions are doing what they have done for the last twenty years. Producing a steady supply of waiters, receptionists and barmen. I am not dismissing those roles. For 2030 we need something different though. We need people who are hybrid, technical and human simultaneously. People with soft skills, genuine commercial understanding and leadership capability. As an industry we are guilty. Guilty of not adopting, not training and not investing nearly enough in the futures of the young people coming through our ranks.
So what does 2030 actually look like in terms of the roles we need to prepare for in hospitality?
I don’t believe every hotel needs a permanent AI specialist sitting on their payroll. What I do believe is that AI consultancies are going to do very well indeed contracting with hotels, independents and BnBs, coming in and conducting proper AI audits. Taking honest stock of where a business actually is versus where it thinks it is. Most of us would be quite frightened by what that audit reveals.
The second role I think is coming whether we are ready for it or not is the sustainability manager at hotel level, or at least on a nodal level. The EU compliance requirements are already knocking on the door of any operator who wants the big European tour operators sending business their way. Dedicated sustainability roles embedded in our properties are coming. People working across community engagement, water and electricity management, feeding back into the grid, bridging the gap between the business and the environment it operates in. That is a real job and a critically important job. Right now we are training nobody for it.
Here is the thing I feel most strongly about though. We have created a generation of office jockey General Managers. Our GMs are drowning in data that needs to be engineered, analysed, compiled and sent upward through layers of corporate reporting. It is keeping brilliant, passionate, hospitality-born people trapped behind desks when they should be out on the floor.
“Management by Walking Around”, which should be the most fundamental instinct of any hotelier, has been slowly strangled by administrative burden that technology should already be handling for us. By 2030 there will be no excuse. The data engineering, the reporting, the analysis is by and large automated. When that happens our General Managers get to go back to doing what they came into this industry to do.
That is what 2030 looks like to me. Not robots replacing people. A General Manager back in the lobby where they belong.
Guy Stehlik is the Founder and CEO of BON Hotels and spoke on the panel “Skills 2030: The Tourism Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet But Should” at the WTM Africa 2026 Future Stage in Cape Town.
