Reducing Employee Turnover in the Tourism Sector Through Human Resource Technologies

Employee turnover is a persistent cost and quality problem in tourism and hospitality, and the sector is expected to face labour shortages as demand grows. Human resource (HR) technologies, such as digital recruitment, e-onboarding, scheduling applications, pulse surveys and people analytics, are increasingly proposed as retention tools, but their use is rarely grounded in turnover theory or tested with sound evaluation designs. This article develops a lifecycle-based conceptual framework that links HR technologies to the psychological mechanisms identified in turnover research (satisfaction, job embeddedness, work–life balance and perceived fairness) and to turnover intention, actual turnover and its costs. The study combines a purposive synthesis of 13 scholarly sources with a descriptive reading of published secondary data from the World Travel & Tourism Council, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and earlier hotel turnover-cost studies, supplemented by Uzbekistan-focused evidence. The data show that the accommodation and food services sector in the United States has had a markedly higher separation rate than the economy as a whole (5.5 versus 3.3 in 2025), that the WTTC projects a global travel and tourism labour shortfall of more than 43 million workers by 2035, and that hotel studies estimate the cost of a single turnover event at roughly 27–30% of the position’s total salary. The article derives five testable propositions, a measurement scheme and a staged evaluation design. The propositions are not empirically tested here, and the evidence from Uzbekistan on HR technology in tourism is currently very limited.