Jeremy Curry on Building a Hospitality Culture That Lasts

Culture is one of the most discussed and least understood concepts in hospitality management, and Jeremy Curry has spent years trying to understand what actually distinguishes organisations that build it successfully from those that produce culture documents without changing behaviour. His conclusions are practical and at times uncomfortable.

The starting point for Jeremy is definitional. Culture is not what a hotel says about itself in its recruitment materials or on its website. It is not the values listed in the employee handbook. It is the aggregate of thousands of small decisions made by people throughout the organisation when no one senior is watching — how a member of housekeeping responds to an unusual guest request, how a restaurant supervisor handles a complaint in a colleague's section, how a general manager behaves on a difficult day. Guests can feel the difference between a team that has internalised a genuine culture and one that is performing a script within twenty minutes of arrival. The performance is legible and it shapes every subsequent moment of the stay.

Jeremy talks at length about the workforce crisis that is reshaping how leading hospitality organisations think about culture and retention. The headline framing of the talent challenge as a compensation problem misses the deeper issue. The organisations with the lowest turnover in his reporting are not always the highest payers — they are consistently the ones where a frontline employee can see a plausible path from their current role to something more senior, and where the journey between the two is actively managed rather than left to chance. Structured development programmes, internal promotion rates, and visible examples of people who have come through the ranks: these are the signals that a property is serious about its people rather than treating them as interchangeable labour.

The generation question is one Jeremy handles with more nuance than most. The characterisation of Gen Z employees as demanding and entitled misrepresents what he actually observes. The hospitality organisations that are struggling with Gen Z retention are typically those with inconsistent management, opaque career structures, and expectations of loyalty that are not reciprocated. The properties doing well with younger employees are offering flexibility where operationally possible, clarity about where a career can go, and managers who behave consistently rather than differently depending on who is in the building. These are not revolutionary requirements. They are the basics of good management.

Jeremy closes with what he considers the most reliable leading indicator of cultural health: whether frontline employees talk about the culture of the organisation in their own words, unprompted, without sounding like they are reciting a training document. When that happens, the culture is real. When it does not, the values are performance rather than belief — and the guests will eventually notice.