How to Onboard Seasonal Staff Fast (Without Training Chaos)

In the Netherlands, the hospitality sector churns through staff at 40% annually. Holiday parks face a similar high-turnover environment. You rehire half your team every season, and each new person represents a week or two of time that could’ve been spent actually running the park.

The standard approach is to treat onboarding like a college orientation. Comprehensive training: walk them through the system, review all the policies, have them shadow someone for a few days, then cut them loose. It makes sense in theory. It doesn’t work in practice.

The problem is that you’re training people on a system as a whole, when they actually need to do three specific things: check guests in, check them out, and handle the occasional weird request. Everything else is noise.

Why your current approach wastes two weeks

Traditional onboarding assumes your seasonal staff will use all the features of your PMS regularly. They won’t. A receptionist touches maybe 10% of your system’s capabilities. A maintenance person touches a different 10%. You spend days teaching them features they’ll never use, and by the time they actually need to check in their first real guest, they’ve forgotten half of what you told them.

There’s also this thing called cognitive overload. Tell someone how to do something before they’ve actually done it, and it doesn’t stick. They nod along, but the information doesn’t attach to anything real. Show them once while they’re actually doing it? That works.

Then there’s the trainer problem. Your best experienced staff member is the worst person to train someone new. They know all the shortcuts and workarounds. They do things the way “we’ve always done it here.” They teach everything they know, which is useful for maybe 30% of what they know, and confusing for the other 70%.

And nobody’s actually verified that anyone learned anything. Someone says they get it, but maybe they’re just being polite. You don’t find out until day three when they mess up a booking.

What actually works

Structure training around actual tasks, not system features. This is obvious when you say it out loud, but almost nobody does it.

Start day one with check-in. Show one real check-in. Then have them do the next one while you watch. Correct them in real-time. Do this five more times. They’ve now checked in seven people. They understand the screen, they understand the flow, they can handle variations (early arrival, accessibility needs, payment issues). They’re not an expert, but they can do the job.

Day two is check-out and modifications. Same approach. Show one, they do three, you’re done with the core. By day three they’re handling common problems: guest shows up a day early, someone’s room isn’t ready, payment didn’t process. Walk through what that looks like. Simulate a few scenarios. They see how you handle them.

Day four they work a real shift while you’re available. By day five, they can work independently on the core stuff.

This isn’t training. This is learning by doing, which is actually how people learn things.

Why this matters for your business

You lose about 2 weeks per seasonal hire with the traditional approach. If you hire 15 people, that’s 30 weeks of productive capacity you don’t have during your busiest season. In a holiday park, busy season is when you make your money.

With task-based training, you lose five days per hire. Same fifteen people, that’s fifteen weeks of productivity you’re not throwing away. That’s a massive difference.

There’s also the error rate thing. New staff trained this way make fewer mistakes because they learned by doing. They didn’t learn theory, they learned the actual flow of work. When something unexpected happens, they’ve seen it happen before (even if just once), so they don’t panic.

And honestly, it just reduces the chaos. Traditional onboarding creates this cloud of anxiety around every new hire. Task-based training feels calmer because both you and the new person know exactly what they’re supposed to be able to do by the end of each day.

Measuring whether it’s working

Don’t measure “training completion.” Measure actual performance.

Track error rates: incorrect guest info, booking mistakes, escalations. New staff should hit 95% accuracy on core tasks by day five. If they’re not, either the training was unclear or your system is confusing. Either way, that’s your problem to fix.

Track how long until they can work unsupervised. Target is 5-7 days for basic operations. If it’s consistently two weeks, something’s wrong.

Try it with one hire first. Use task-based training on just check-in and check-out. Time how long it takes for them to be independent. Compare to how long previous hires took. If it works, make it your standard.

The actual work involved

This requires more intentionality than handing someone a manual. You have to identify the three to five essential tasks. You have to prepare real examples. You have to actually sit down with the person instead of delegating it to whoever’s free.

That upfront investment is about one to two days of coordination time per season. The payoff is five to ten days of actual productivity during the period when you need it most.

Most parks have the bandwidth to do this. They just haven’t thought about it deliberately. The default is comprehensive training because that’s what large hotels do, but large hotels have different problems and different resources than a fifty-unit holiday park.

Break the pattern. It works.

References

Koninklijke Horeca Nederland. (2023). Horeca arbeidsmarkt rapportage 2023. Available at: https://assets.khn.nl/uploads/20240108_Arbeidsmarktrapportage-DEF.pdf. Reports annual staff turnover rates of 40% in Dutch hospitality, with restaurant subsectors experiencing 44-45% annual turnover.

Cashdesk. Personeelsverloop in de horeca. Available at: https://www.cashdesk.nl/personeelsverloop-horeca-2/. Analysis of turnover causes, consequences, and solutions in Dutch hospitality sector.