Key Takeaways:
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The hospitality industry is a wide sector, encompassing hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, tourism, and events, but all of those businesses share a common goal: to provide an unforgettable customer experience.
The industry depends on its workers to provide top-notch, white-glove service, but recently, the hospitality industry has been struggling to find and keep skilled employees.
For example, 67% of hotel operators report understaffing, with around 12% experiencing understaffing so severe that it threatens their ability to stay open, while 45% of restaurants report being understaffed. However, it’s not just about the inability to hire skilled staff; the industry also needs to keep existing staff. Turnover is higher in hospitality than in most industries, hovering around 70-80% annually.
With this level of churn, the sector needs to invest in near-constant onboarding, as well as training that may improve engagement and staff retention. A mobile-friendly, cloud-based learning management system (LMS) is critical for hospitality providers looking to centralize and streamline hospitality training.
What is a Hospitality LMS?
An LMS is a specialized software platform designed to administer, document, track, report on, and deliver training courses and programs. In the hospitality industry, an LMS may be used to deliver mandatory compliance training, health and safety courses, or to onboard new employees.
Easily accessible to all learners in an organization, an LMS is most frequently used by learning and development professionals to create bespoke courses, assign personalized learning paths to individual learners and glean insights from the analytics provided by the platform.
Rather than relying on a scattershot approach to training employees, an LMS acts as a single source of truth for all training activities, providing a record of every completed course and certification, so that leadership knows which learners are in compliance and which need to update their skills.
What to Look for in a Hospitality LMS
The hospitality industry employs a wide variety of roles, from front of house to back of house, across lodging services and travel arrangements. Even one enterprise may employ several very different kinds of employees with different learning needs. For this reason, it’s critical to find an LMS that can serve many different kinds of learners. Below are some features to look for:
- Mobile-first learning – Most hospitality employees work away from desks. They need an LMS that meets them where they are, whether they’re taking a break from waiting tables or waiting on fresh linens. An LMS should offer native mobile apps, offline access (so many people in hospitality work in basements, after all), responsive content that works on any device, and multilingual support.
- Rapid, role-based onboarding – Not all learners need the same training. Look for tools that let you create customized learning paths for roles such as:
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- Front desk
- Housekeeping
- Wait and bar staff
- Culinary teams
- Events and banquets
- Facilities and maintenance
- Compliance & certification tools – Compliance and up to date certification is critical in hospitality. Look for an LMS that allows your staff to be compliant in food safety, alcohol service, workplace safety, and local hygiene regulations. It should be able to track completions, send renewal alerts, and maintain audit-ready records.
- Performance analytics & reporting – Without strong reporting it’s difficult to know how well learners across your organization are progressing on their learning paths. However, a learning platform with robust reporting lets leaders see all your learners’ progress at a glance. Dashboards let you identify training gaps, monitor course completions, learning data to guest satisfaction or operational metrics and track location-specific performance.
- Engagement features – Training doesn’t have to be boring. Look for an LMS able to host gamified learning, video, animations, interactive simulations, peer to peer content sharing and instructor-led training.
How can an LMS Benefit the Hospitality Industry?
In the hospitality industry, it’s important to offer a high standard of service. An LMS ensures that all your learners receive the same content and are able to provide consistent levels of service across all of your locations.
Take the example of Travel Counsellors, a global travel business based in Manchester, England. Travel Counsellors, which specializes in bespoke holidays and business travel, has more than 1,800 travel agents running their own home-based franchises in more than seven countries. It was important to the company that their agents were all able to provide the same high level of service.
By using Litmos’s learning platform, Travel Counsellors was able to provide consistent training for their agents worldwide, while shortening onboarding time and increasing both sales and productivity by 18%.
Does the Hospitality Industry Need an LMS?
In short, yes.
In hospitality, your people are the experience. Choosing the right LMS is one of the most powerful ways to improve service quality, reduce turnover, and build a skilled, confident workforce ready to meet rising guest expectations.
A modern hospitality LMS should be mobile-friendly, easy to manage, rich with role-based content, and built to support the fast, complex nature of hotel and restaurant operations. With the right platform, training becomes a strategic advantage, helping every employee shine and every guest feel valued.
Ready to transform your organization’s learning and development? Contact Litmos today to schedule a free demo and discover how our LMS can help you streamline onboarding, boost employee engagement, and drive operational efficiency. Book your free Litmos demo today.
