Hospitality operators are putting more money into staff training this year, according to the 2026 Hospitality Training 360 Report, but a shortage of time rather than budget has become the industry’s biggest obstacle to actually delivering it. The survey, now in its third year, was carried out in January 2026 by training platform Opus and the Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers (CHART), drawing on responses from 190 learning and development and operations leaders representing more than 30,000 locations.
Between 55% and 61% of hospitality organisations expect to increase training spend in 2026, up from 41-55% who reported budget increases the year before. Even so, 55% of respondents said time pressure and the speed of day-to-day operations, rather than money, now shape their training decisions most, as multi-unit growth and compliance requirements make it harder to fit training in.
Training moves into the flow of work
Rachael Nemeth, chief executive and co-founder of Opus, said the central challenge is “demonstrating training’s impact on operations and the bottom line,” adding that there is “a shift toward training that happens in the flow of work” rather than in separate classroom sessions. The report found operators moving away from onboarding-only programmes towards continuous, field-led development, with managers increasingly responsible for coaching staff on the floor rather than passing them off to a dedicated trainer.
Proving what works remains hard
Most leaders believe their training improves business performance, but few can prove it with hard numbers. The report found 81% of respondents still rely on manager feedback, a soft indicator, to judge whether training is working, while more concrete measures such as time-to-proficiency and rates of operational error are tracked far less often. Kelly McCutcheon, CHART’s president and group director of training at Whataburger, said hospitality trainers already know that good training shows up in the guest experience and the numbers, but that “the expectation is to connect those dots more clearly.” Two-thirds of respondents also reported regular or proficient use of artificial intelligence in their training workflows, mostly for content development and planning.
Why it matters
Hospitality remains one of the highest-turnover sectors in the economy, and hotels and restaurants that fail to train staff quickly and consistently risk both service quality and safety. The findings suggest the industry is investing to fix that, but that speed, not money, is now the harder problem to solve, especially as operators lean on AI tools to compress the time it takes to get new staff ready for the floor.
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