Hotels and logistics operators have more in common than it might appear. Across geographies and economic cycles, both industries face the same stubborn reality: not enough workers to meet demand, and no clear end in sight. This is a defining feature of both industries, one that is deepening as workforces age and domestic supply continues to shrink.
A problem that won’t fix itself
This isn’t a temporary labor crunch that’s going to disappear when the economy changes. High turnover, difficult working conditions, and the persistent unattractiveness of some of these roles to domestic workers have long made hospitality and trucking hard to staff. An aging workforce is now compounding that structural problem, and the combined gap is one that no domestic measure on its own appears capable of closing atthe scale these sectors need.
Hospitality
In Europe, hospitality has long managed on a combination of domestic flexible labor and intra-EU movement. Both of those pipelines are narrowing. Turnover in housekeeping and food and beverage service across the EU runs at 20-35% annually.1 These aren’t isolated staffing problems, they’re sector-wide patterns that employers are dealing with year after year.
In mediterranean markets, like Spain, Portugal, Italy or Greece, the problem is compounded by extreme seasonality. Roughly 60-70% of annual tourism nights fall between May and September, creating predictable, acute labor gaps that operators must fill from scratch every year. 2 The Canary Islands are an exception that proves the rule: year-round demand, but still chronically short-staffed.
The cost adds up quickly. Industry research puts the replacement cost of a single housekeeper turnover event at €5,000-8,000, accounting for recruitment, retraining, and productivity loss during the gap.3 Operators running 50-100% annual turnover in these roles, which is not unusual, end up spending far more than they would on building a well-designed international recruitment program.
Europe is not alone in this, Japan’s hospitality sector is facing an almost identical structural crisis and is one of the clearest examples of what happens when domestic labor supply genuinely runs out. Japan received a record 36.9 million foreign visitors in 2024, yet hotels, ryokan, and restaurants are chronically understaffed as the country’s workforce shrinks and ages. Japan significantly expanded its Tokutei gino (specified skilled worker visa), specifically for hospitality, with a target of 60,000 foreign workers in the sector by 2027.4
Trucking and logistics
In trucking, the numbers are starker and better documented because the industry measures vacancy cost directly: an empty truck is an idle asset with a fixed daily price tag.
The International Road Transportation Union (IRU) puts current EU driver vacancies at over 400,000, with projections reaching 745,000 by 2028 if current trends hold.5 Germany alone accounts for 80,000-100,000 of those vacancies.6 A parked truck costs its operator €300-600 per day in unavoidable fixed cost (vehicle finance, insurance, routes left unserved, etc.).7 IRU estimates the aggregate annual cost to the EU sector at €5-7 billion in foregone revenue.8
The underlying cause is structural. The average EU truck driver is 44-47 years old, and in some markets, retirements outpace new entrants by a ratio of three to one.9 However, this shortage is not only about aging, italso reflects the persistent unattractiveness of these jobs, which demand long hours, time away from home, and working conditions that have proven slow to reform. This isn’t the kind of shortage that can be solved with another recruitment campaign or training initiative. Policy reforms to make these jobs more attractive take time and sustain investment before they produce results. Labor mobility, driven by demographic shifts elsewhere, offers a complementary path with multiple wins: it addresses the gap now, while those longer-term reforms take hold.
The sector has been taking measures to address this issue. Driver wages in Germany and the Netherlands have risen 15-25% since 2020 as operators compete for a shrinking pool. Major logistics companies, DHL Supply Chain, DB Schenker, and others, have launched internal driver academies targeting new domestic entrants. The IRU has run campaigns to attract younger workers and women into the profession.10
Japan, again, shares a similar story, following regulatory changes in 2024 that limited truck driver overtime hours, a reform aimed at improving worker condition, created an estimated shortfall of 30% freight volume.11 SBS Holdings, one of Japan’s largest logistics companies, announced plans to hire 1,800 foreign drivers from Indonesia, Vietnam and other Southeast Asia countries, a signal that the sector is already building an international recruitment infrastructure that a domestic workforce is unlikely to provide.12
What the field is telling us
Over June 2026, LaMP ran a structured listening campaign on LinkedIn posing four questions to practitioners, employers, recruiters, and policymakers working across hospitality and trucking labor mobility. The response was strong with more than 160 votes and dozens of comments across the four polls.
Who is missing from the table? Our first question asked which stakeholder type is most underrepresented in labor mobility initiatives. 40% of respondents said international recruiters, the people who actually operate the pipelines that move workers across borders. Not government agencies. Not non-profit organizations. The people closest to running these systems believe they’re still missing from many of the conversations shaping them.
What is blocking scale in hospitality? 53% of respondents identified visa and regulatory complexity as the biggest barrier to scaling labor mobility in hospitality. Not employer reluctance. Not worker quality. Not cost alone. The system itself. That matters because it suggests the bottleneck isn’t demand, it’s the system itself.
What is blocking scale in trucking? In trucking, 54% pointed to licensing and skills recognition as the primary barrier. A skilled, experienced driver from Colombia or Guatemala can be four to twelve months away from legally operating a vehicle in Germany or Spain, not because they lack the skill, but because no bilateral recognition agreement exists and the conversion process, though navigable, requires employer sponsorship, income during the waiting period, and hands-on administrative support that most operators don’t know how to provide.13 The bottleneck is in the process.
What actually works? The final question asked where respondents had seen labor mobility work best. 80% said employer-led partnerships, that’s notable because it challenges the assumption that government or nonprofit-led programs are always the primary driver of successful labor mobility.
Bilateral agreements and NGO programs are important; they often create the legal and welfare foundations that make employer-led programs possible and ethical. But the field’s reading is clear: the energy, trust, and execution capacity that makes programs actually deliver for workers and employers lives primarily in the private sector.
What stood out across all four conversations was that respondents largely agreed on where the biggest obstacles are, and, just as importantly, on what already works. In the case of these sectors, the challenge isn’t diagnosing the problem, it’s building the infrastructure to make proven approaches easier to scale.
Why labor mobility? And not just wages, training or automation?
The case for labor mobility is stronger when it is honest about the alternatives, and about what those alternatives can and cannot do.
Higher wages can help companies attract workers away from other employers, but they don’t create new workers out of thin air. Europe’s trucking industry is a good example: despite years of rising wages, the pool of available drivers keeps shrinking. That’s because wage increases can only redistribute a limited, existing supply of workers, they don’t expand it when the underlying problem is demographic (fewer people entering the field in the first place). The same pattern shows up in hospitality: when employers compete on pay in a tight labor market, they mostly end up poaching staff from one another, rather than drawing new workers into the industry.
Automation is a real long-term force in both sectors, but its timeline doesn’t match today’s workforce crisis. Semi-autonomous truck platooning technology is a 10–15-year horizon for meaningful commercial deployment, robotic housekeeping is further still.14 Automation may eventually reshape the demand side of this equation, but it does not address the supply problem today.
Japan is perhaps the most interesting case on this point, precisely because it is investing seriously in both tracks simultaneously. Japanese logistics companies are piloting autonomous delivery drivers and drone freight on rural routes, hotel groups are testing robotic check-in, AI-assisted housekeeping support, and service robots in corridors.15 And at the same time, Japan is opening its labor migration pathways faster than ever before.16 Japan understands that while automation will help, it might not arrive in time to address the workforce deficit of the next five to ten years.
Domestic training pipelines matter enormously and should be invested in regardless of what else is being done. But training initiatives alone cannot solve a supply problem of this magnitude. When three drivers retire for every one who enters the profession, the domestic pool shrinks faster than any domestic recruitment or training campaign can replenish, regardless of how well those programs are designed or funded.
The case for labor mobility
Workers in Latin America and other regions are actively seeking opportunities across borders. The challenge isn’t finding people who want these jobs. It’s building the infrastructure that allows them to move through existing pathways safely, reliably, and at scale. This often includes pre-departure training, employer navigation support, and bilateral coordination that turns a legal text into a functioning corridor.
There are well-documented cases of programs managed well with good outcomes. For example, Australia’s Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, covering hospitality, agriculture, and care, records contract completion rates above 80% for international workers, compared to roughly 50% for locally-recruited equivalents.17 The Philippine’s POEA framework has for decades produced hospitality workers whose training standards are so trusted by Gulf and southeast Asian employers that Filipino staff command premium placement in four- and five-star properties globally.18 The mechanism behind both programs is generally the same: pre-departure training, verifiable credential standards, and employer accountability frameworks that make it rational for employers to invest in the pipeline.
Wage differentials between countries in Latin America and EU destinations are large enough to make migration genuinely worthwhile for workers, while circular program design preserves the community ties that make return migration realistic and desirable. Workers who return home bring savings, skills, and in a meaningful share of cases, capital for starting a small business. Well-designed circular migration programs haveconsistently shown to produce real economic effects in origin communities.19
The legal instruments are largely in place to implement labor mobility. Spain’s Contratación en Origen, Germany’s 2023 Skilled Worker Immigration Act experience pathway, the EU Seasonal Workers Directive, Italy’s Decreto Flussi, and Japan’s Tokutei Gino visa all provide viable entry points for international workers in hospitality and transport. What they share is underutilization, not because employers don’t need workers, but because no one has built the navigation infrastructure that makes these pathways practical, especially for SMEs.
Our open invitation
Hospitality and trucking are not niche industries facing niche problems. Together, they underpin how people travel, eat, and receive the goods they depend on. The workforce challenge both sectors face is global, structural, and urgent, and labor mobility, designed well, is one of the few interventions that can address it at the speed and scale required.
The infrastructure to make that happen is what LaMP is building, in partnership with the employers, associations, and practitioners who are closest to this problem. If you are working in this space, formally, informally, or experimentally, we want to hear from you. What you know about what works, what breaks, and what the system is missing is exactly the input that shapes what gets built next.
We also invite you to join this year’s Global Workforce Xchange ’26, which will serve as a meeting ground to explore shared barriers and solutions across sectors, geographies and stakeholders. For more information and to secure your ticket, please visit: https://www.globalworkforcexchange.org/
If you’d like to find out more or get in touch, email Melissa Saucedo at msaucedo@lampforum.org
