Hotel Staffing Challenges in Savannah and How Hotels Handle Them

The main staffing problem for Savannah hotels is that demand goes up and down. A St. Patrick’s weekend can fill nearly every hotel room in the county, and a weekday in a slow month can leave the same hotel with more staff than work. On top of that, the local labor market is tight, and housekeeping and front desk are the departments hotels across the country most often report as short staffed.

The hotels that handle this well do three things. They size their own team for a normal week and protect those hours. They plan for peak weekends months ahead. And they line up extra help for the busy seasons and for call-offs before they need it, from cross-trained staff or from a staffing partner who already knows the property.

At Tumi Hospitality, we place W-2 hospitality employees in hotels in Savannah, and that is how most of the hotels we work with use us: a steady group of our people on their roster all year, with more added for the busy seasons.

Why Savannah’s demand makes hotel staffing hard

Savannah’s biggest weekends can fill nearly every hotel room in the county. St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Friday in 2023, and before the holiday about 17,000 Chatham County hotel rooms were expected to be 99% full on Friday and Saturday. As Michael Owens, CEO of Savannah’s Tourism Leadership Council, told WTOC that year: “It’s fairly common that we get really close to sellout when it’s on a Friday.”

How big a peak gets depends on the calendar. In 2026, St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Tuesday, and Visit Savannah’s CEO, Joseph Marinelli, named that as one reason the year’s tourism numbers came in softer than usual. The same event can need a different number of people from one year to the next, so each year’s staffing plan has to start from that year’s dates.

Savannah’s busy seasons for hotels

In 2022, the Savannah Morning News described the city’s busy times this way:

Treat this as a guide rather than a fixed calendar. One-off events add their own spikes, such as the SEC Women’s Volleyball Championship.

Group business may also move onto weekdays. The Savannah Convention Center expansion officially opened in 2025, doubling exhibit space to 200,000 square feet and adding a 40,000-square-foot ballroom. When construction began, Marinelli said the larger building would help “increase occupancy and visitor spending Sunday through Wednesday.” If it does, hotels near the convention center will need full housekeeping, front desk and banquet teams on days they used to run lean. For hotels that host meetings and receptions, our hotel banquet server staffing page covers that side of the work.

Why it’s hard to find hotel workers in Savannah

Savannah’s labor market is tight. Unemployment in the Savannah metro area was 3.1% in September 2026, and it ranged from 2.4% to 3.1% between April and September. When nearly everyone who wants a job already has one, a new hire usually comes from another employer, and that employer may be the hotel down the street.

The whole sector also hires at the same time. The same federal figures show leisure and hospitality jobs in the area rising from 28,100 in April to 28,900 in June 2026, then falling to 27,700 by September. When every hotel, restaurant and attraction staffs up for the same months, they are all recruiting from the same group of people at once.

Pay and schedules are where hotels compete for those people. In a national survey by the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA), higher wages were the strategy hotels reported most often for attracting and keeping workers, at 47%. About one in five hotels were offering flexible working hours. Flexible hours are the one a hotel can often offer without changing its pay scale, and for someone fitting work around school, family or a second job, a schedule that works can decide where they apply.

Which hotel departments are most often short staffed

Housekeeping and front desk are the hotel departments most often short staffed. In AHLA’s national survey, run from December 2024 to January 2025, 65% of hotels reported staffing shortages. Housekeeping was the department they most often reported shortages in, at 38%, followed by front desk at 26%, culinary at 14% and maintenance at 13%. The figures are national, but they line up with where a Savannah peak weekend puts the most pressure: rooms that have to be turned between checkout and check-in, and a front desk that has to keep up with arrivals.

One of our hotel clients calls housekeeping the heart of the business. We cover the department in more detail in our article on hotel housekeeping staffing challenges and solutions.

Hotels that host conventions, weddings and banquets also need cooks and banquet servers in the same seasons that every other event in town needs them.

How to staff for St. Patrick’s Day and other peak weekends

The hotels that handle St. Patrick’s weekend well start early. Before the 2023 weekend, one large hotel told WTOC it was bringing in about 30 to 40 more people than usual and had been planning for it since the fall. That is the right timeline for any peak weekend. A few things are worth settling well ahead:

• Mark the peak dates for the coming year, and note which day of the week each one falls on.
• Lock in schedules and time-off rules for your own team early.
• Cross-train staff who can step into housekeeping or the front desk if a department falls short.
• Ask your staffing partner for extra people weeks ahead, not days.
• Ask for the same people each time, so they already know your property.

If you are asking a staffing partner for regular staff for the first time, expect it to take two to three weeks with us. Same-day or next-day help is possible only from people already on our roster, so a call on the Thursday before a sold-out weekend may come too late to fill every shift.

How to handle slow stretches without losing good people

Slow weeks can cost a hotel its good people. When hours get cut, employees who can find steadier hours elsewhere often take them, and with unemployment near 3%, most of them can.

The steadier approach is to size your own team for a normal week and protect their hours. Then add people for the peaks. Your staff keep a steady schedule, and you don’t carry extra payroll through the slow months. Many of the hotels we work with have a steady group of Tumi employees on their roster all year, and ask us for more people when a busy season like Christmas is coming.

How hotels cut turnover

High turnover affects the whole hotel industry. In September 2026, about 5 of every 100 workers in accommodation and food services quit their jobs in a single month, compared with about 2 in 100 across all industries. We break down what that costs in the real cost of hotel employee turnover.

A housekeeping team that has worked together for years has its own culture, and a new person joining it can feel like an outsider. It helps to pair each new hire with someone on the team and check in with them often. Pay, steady hours and benefits matter too.

We place our people with the same goal. Our employees are W-2 employees with health, dental and life insurance and paid time off, and we aim to keep each one at the same property for the long term, so your team gets to know them and they get to know your hotel.

How to cover last-minute call-offs and overnight shifts

There will always be last-minute call-offs, however well you plan. On a sold-out weekend in Savannah, the person who usually fills that gap is a manager, cleaning rooms or working the desk instead of running the hotel. A plan made before the call comes keeps that from happening:

• Keep a short list of cross-trained staff who are willing to pick up extra shifts.
• Know which staffing partner you will call, and how quickly they can send someone who already knows your property.
• Keep separate backup names for overnight shifts. A day-shift employee who covers a night has to work a double or come back after a few hours off, so the day list rarely covers nights well.

Our guide on how to handle last-minute hotel staffing shortages walks through more options, and why overnight hotel staffing is hard to fill covers the night shift in depth.

Questions to ask a hotel staffing agency

A staffing partner adds people to your team, and your own employees stay. What the partner takes on is the employer’s side of each person it sends: hiring, payroll, benefits and workers’ compensation.

With Tumi Hospitality, every employee we place is our own W-2 employee. We carry their payroll, benefits, workers’ compensation and insurance. Hotels we work with typically see 12 to 18% annual savings on hard employment costs.

If you are comparing partners, these are the questions worth asking:

• Are your workers W-2 employees? A W-2 employer pays the payroll taxes and workers’ compensation for its workers, and it carries the risk if workers are wrongly treated as contractors. Our article on W-2 employment in hotel staffing explains why it matters.
• Will someone visit my property in person? Tumi assigns an area manager to your hotel, who visits your property every week to check on the work and meet with your managers.
• Who answers when something goes wrong at night? We have on-call customer service for urgent issues around the clock, with general questions handled during business hours.
• How fast can you really fill a need? An honest partner will tell you the timeline, including when same-day help isn’t possible.
• Do you focus on hotels? Hotel work has its own standards, and the people you bring in should know them.

Talk to us about your Savannah hotel

If your next big weekend or a stretch of call-offs is worrying you, we would be glad to talk it through. You can read more about our hospitality staffing in Savannah, or contact us to request a no-obligation consultation about your property’s staffing challenges and receive a proposal built around your needs. You can also call us at (512) 722-6000 or email info@tumihospitality.com.