By Rissa Gatdula-Lumontad
In this conversation: Roberto Gonzalez, Cloudstaff’s Growth Consultant for Travel and Tourism, discusses the workforce gap reshaping travel and tour operations, why companies underestimate virtual team lead times, how to prioritize back-office versus customer-facing roles, and what to do when past outsourcing attempts fell short.
The Travel and Tourism Industry’s Growing Workforce Gap
Few industries understand the cost of a staffing gap better than travel and tourism. When a cruise booking goes wrong, when an itinerary falls apart, or when a customer cannot get answers in the critical window before departure, the damage is operational and deeply personal. Vacations are planned for months, sometimes years, and the people responsible for delivering them work under pressure that most industries rarely see. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, global demand for workers in travel and tourism is expected to exceed supply by more than 43 million by 2035, with labor availability sitting 16 percent below demand levels. Against that backdrop, the question of how travel companies build resilient, scalable teams has never been more urgent.
We sat down with Roberto Gonzalez, Cloudstaff’s Growth Consultant for Travel and Tourism in North America, to understand what the industry actually needs right now and what it takes to build teams that hold up when the pressure is highest.
The workforce numbers for the travel and tourism sector are striking. What are you seeing on the ground when you talk to travel and tour businesses?
The data reflects what I am hearing in every conversation. Companies are stretched. Their local talent pools are tight, wages are rising, and the jobs that require consistent human interaction, which are the most important roles in this industry, are the hardest to fill and retain. A lot of operators are in a reactive staffing mode, which means they are constantly playing catch-up rather than building something sustainable. What concerns me most is how normalized that feels.
When I talk to travel and tourism businesses who have been operating understaffed for two or three seasons in a row, there is almost an acceptance of it. That is where I think the conversation needs to shift, because a sustainable alternative is available and it works.
What do travel and tourism companies typically underestimate about the lead time involved in building a strong virtual team?
Almost universally, they underestimate it. The assumption is that you can decide to build a virtual team in October and have a fully contributing member by the time peak season hits. That is rarely how it works, especially in travel and tourism, where the product knowledge required to serve customers well is genuinely complex.
A great virtual team member in this industry needs time to learn your booking systems, your brand standards, your contracts, your escalation protocols, and your most common customer scenarios. That learning curve is manageable, but it has to be respected. The clients who get the best outcomes are the ones who start the conversation in the off-season, give new team members time to ramp properly, and treat onboarding as an investment rather than a box to check. I tell travel companies consistently: the window to build for next peak season is right now, not three months before it starts.
There is a meaningful difference between back-office roles and customer-facing roles in travel and tourism. How do you think about which to build first?
That is one of the most important questions a travel or tour company needs to answer before they start building, and not enough of them ask it explicitly. Back-office roles, things like reservation support, itinerary administration, data entry, and supplier coordination, are typically faster to bring online and easier to integrate because the work is more process-driven. Customer-facing roles require deeper product knowledge and stronger communication skills, and the bar for brand alignment is considerably higher.
For most travel and tour companies I work with, especially those building a virtual team for the first time, I recommend starting with back-office roles. It lets your onshore team see the model working in a lower-risk environment, builds institutional trust in the virtual team, and frees up your customer-facing staff to focus on the interactions that matter most. Once that foundation is solid, expanding into customer-facing roles becomes a much more confident decision.
What is your honest assessment of a travel or tour company that has tried outsourcing before and had a bad customer experience?
So my first question is always: what did that engagement actually look like? Because honestly, when I dig into it, the real problem isn’t the concept of virtual staffing. It’s usually a mismatch between what the provider was offering and what the business actually needed. Either the team was undertrained, roles weren’t defined precisely enough, there was no real integration into workflows, and they just operated in isolation, or sometimes it was simply the wrong provider for a specialized industry. But here’s what I’ve learned: engagement isn’t really an emotional or morale issue. True engagement is about cross-cultural integration. The client has to actively help the remote staff get embedded into their processes and into the culture of the organization. That’s what creates real synergy, tenure, proficiency, and performance.
The companies that have had difficult experiences and then come back with a better-structured approach, one where they genuinely integrate the virtual team rather than keep them at arm’s length, consistently get different results. I take those conversations seriously because the skepticism is earned, and the only way to work through it is to be very specific about what will be different this time: genuine embedding, not just staffing. At the end of the day, travel and tourism isn’t a generic customer service environment, and neither is the relationship between a client and a distributed team that’s meant to work as an actual extension of their organization.
If a travel or tour company executive came to you tomorrow and said they were ready to start, what is the first thing you would actually do?
I wouldn’t jump straight into travel staffing plans. I’d start by asking questions. What are the real pain points? Which functions are draining their team? What’s keeping them from doing the work that actually matters? And how can we genuinely collaborate to make their people successful day to day?
Once I understand where they’re struggling, I’d map out which roles are revenue generating and which are revenue protecting, including cancellations, renewals, and upsells. These are the areas where a virtual team member can have a meaningful impact on profitability. That’s where the real value sits.
The best engagements start with an honest conversation about actual challenges, not headcount or cost. Throughout the process, the focus stays on delivering world‑class service in every interaction.
Recruiters and managers play a crucial role in connecting the right professionals to a company’s needs. Their involvement ensures a strong match that supports both operational capacity and productivity. Digital platforms and tools also help streamline onboarding and communication, improving day‑to‑day practices and overall performance.
Prioritizing customer experience, or CX, is essential. Managing expectations and making CX a clear priority helps travel companies deliver consistent, high‑quality service. With a clear roadmap for building virtual teams, organizations can strengthen their staffing strategies over time and meet peak season demands with greater reliability and confidence.
For the travel industry, the workforce challenge is structural and it is not going away. Roberto’s career journey spans more than fifteen years inside some of the most demanding operational environments this vertical produces, and what he carries from that experience is not a pitch but a perspective: the companies who build intentionally, in the off-season, with the right foundation, are the ones who stop surviving peak seasons and start owning them. The talent exists. The model is proven. The only variable is whether a travel or tourism business decides to act before the pressure forces the decision.