Operational Labor Shortages and Authentic Hospitality: Evidence from Greek Hotels

Operational labor shortages have become a pressing challenge for hospitality organizations, especially in highly seasonal tourism destinations such as Greece, where service experiences are deeply tied to cultural identity and authentic hospitality. While much of the existing research has examined understaffing from operational or human resource management perspectives, limited attention has been paid to its impact on the organizational capacity to sustain authentic hospitality experiences. Using Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) as an interpretive framework, this study views authentic hospitality as an organizational process shaped by employee interaction, cultural transmission, and service delivery practices. Drawing on survey data from 201 hotel employees in Greece, it investigates the relationship between operational labor shortages, organizational pressures, and perceived threats to authentic hospitality within hotel operations. The findings reveal significant positive relationships between work stress and service quality decline, as well as between cultural knowledge and perceived challenges in maintaining authentic hospitality. Multiple regression analysis further shows that reactive hiring, serious understaffing, and payroll cost pressure are significantly linked to perceived challenges in sustaining authentic hospitality, while service quality decline exhibits a positive but statistically non-significant effect in the final model. The study contributes to hospitality authenticity literature by emphasizing employee perceptions of authenticity as an organizationally supported process rather than merely a guest-centered outcome. The results also highlight the importance of workforce planning, recruitment quality, and cultural onboarding in supporting authentic hospitality within Greek hotel operations.