Short-staffed for the season? Stop spending your people on paperwork

Every spring in Greece brings the same headlines, and 2026 is no different. At the start of May, the president of the Panhellenic Federation of Hotel Directors put the number of unfilled tourism jobs in Crete alone at around 6,000, with more than 80,000 across the country. The hardest roles to fill were the ones guests notice most: chefs, waiters, reception and housekeeping.

If you run a hotel, a restaurant, a dive centre or a rental business, you do not need a newspaper to tell you this. You have been interviewing since March.

I cannot help you hire. What I can say, from building software for seasonal businesses, is that most of them lose a surprising number of staff hours to work no guest ever sees.

Where the hours go

Look at a normal peak-season day and count the time spent on these:

• Retyping. A booking arrives by email and is typed into a spreadsheet, then into a calendar, then into whatever tells the boat or the kitchen how many people are coming.
• Chasing. Calling guests to confirm, asking whether a deposit arrived, reminding someone to sign a form.
• Searching. Finding last week's booking, a signed waiver, a phone number, the note about the guest's allergy.
• Answering the same question. Parking, check-in time, what to bring, how to get there.

None of these needs a trained person. All of them are usually done by one, often the person you most need somewhere else.

What removing them looks like

At Mykonos Diving Center, staff were spending more than four hours a day at peak retyping reservations into spreadsheets and updating a shared calendar by hand. The reservation system we built takes bookings from the website automatically and keeps every device on the same schedule. The centre's administrative workload went down by 87%.

The same centre used to have queues at the counter every morning while divers filled in paper forms. With the registration forms we built, customers fill them in on their own phones, in their own language, before or while they wait. The member of staff who used to hand out clipboards and read handwriting is free to do the job they were hired for.

Mykonos Diving CenterRegistration and waivers signed on the customer's own phone

Where I would start

1. Ask your staff, not yourself. Ask each person what they did yesterday that felt like a waste of time. They know, and they will be specific.
2. Count the retyping. Every place the same information is written twice is a candidate. The first one to remove is usually between the booking and the calendar.
3. Move questions to where guests read. Confirmation emails, the website, a sign at reception. Every answer written once is an answer not repeated forty times.
4. Let guests do their own forms. Registration, waivers, preferences, allergies — on their phone, before they arrive.

The honest version

Software will not make a kitchen cook or a room clean itself, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What it does well is remove the invisible admin that sits between your staff and your guests.

Mid-season is not the time to change systems — that is for October. But this is exactly the time to notice where the hours go. Write it down now, while it hurts, and bring the list to us when the season ends.