The first 90 days decide almost everything about a new hire. For years, we were flying blind through them.
In hospitality, we’ve made peace with a brutal number and made it part of our business: Depending on the study, it’s estimated that somewhere between 42 percent and 55 percent of new hires walk out the door within their first 90 days. All of us in hospitality have heard it: “Oh, [department] always turns over that high.”
At Westgate Resorts, our learning and development team stopped accepting that. It all started when I asked a question we couldn’t answer: How are our people really doing in those first 90 days, and are we making a difference?
We knew we were. We just couldn’t prove it at scale, and proving it is essential in a world where HR and L&D are a cost center and not a revenue generator.
The invisible window
Here’s the pattern we eventually uncovered, and it still bothers me. Before we get into how we uncovered it, we found this critical piece of data: new hires reportedly felt supported at 30 days. Confident. On track.
Then, something happened around day 60. Leadership engagement dropped off measurably, and confidence went with it. By the time we’d normally notice someone was struggling, we were queueing up the exit survey!
That 60-day cliff was invisible to us. Turnover reports told us who’d already left. Exit interviews, when they happened, told us why after it was too late to matter. We had lagging indicators and good intentions, and not much in between. Unfortunately, this is often accepted as just the way hospitality is. If you can’t see a problem while it’s happening, you can’t fix it while it still counts.
Why we said ‘go build it’
Every L&D team can show soft data-driven wins. We do a training and service scores go up, or escalations go down. These are not invalid data points, but they don’t move an executive the way a retention number does, and they don’t prove the large-scale financial and team member experience business impact we knew we were having.
So we came up with a different approach. We, and the team members, don’t want another HR survey nobody reads but a living system that captures how new hires and their certified field trainers, or CFTs, experience the first 90 days, and makes that data visible enough to act on. I approached a partner with a mad scientist idea my brain had concocted for what this system would look like and how it would function.
The answer was the best words I could have ever heard: We can build it.
What they built became the Westgate L&D Dataverse, our internally built platform for turning the first 90 days from a timeline into an impact driver.
Flipping the model: peer, not power
Here’s the piece I’m proudest of: While the technology side is moderate, it’s less about technology than psychology and genuine care.
Most check-in models run top-down. A leader or HR asks a nervous new hire, “How’s it going?” And the new hire, who reports to that leader, says “Great,” because of course they do. There’s a power dynamic in the room, and we all need a job.
We flipped it, not because it is bad but because we could level this up. Our 30-60-90-day check-ins are run by CFTs, who are peers, not bosses. People are more honest with a peer, and even more so with a peer who built a relationship already because they trained them. They admit they’re confused, that a process doesn’t make sense, that they haven’t gotten feedback from their leader in three weeks. Those are the exact issues that push someone toward quitting, and now we hear about them while there’s still time to fix them.
Every new hire is linked to their specific CFT in the system. That means we can trace 90-day outcomes all the way down to the individual trainer level, not just by property or department. Accountability and insight—from the same data point. Maybe a CFT has a retention issue and we can re-certify them. We have insight further than we ever could have imagined.
What the data proved
Once the system had a full launch of all phases, the trend was undeniable.
Companywide 90-day turnover dropped every single year we’ve tracked it: 32.2 percent in 2023, down to 25.7 percent in 2024, 22.5 percent in 2025 where three phases were implemented and 19.9 percent so far in 2026. That’s a 38 percent relative reduction from our 2023 baseline.
Set that against an industry where more than half of housekeeping hires are gone in 90 days, and the gap is the whole story. Then we ran the money. Using a transparent cost-per-separation model, talent acquisition plus training and replacement cost by department, the improved retention has avoided roughly $437,000 in turnover cost year to date for 2026, on pace for about $758,000 annualized. Impact.
The unexpected dividend: A succession engine
There is even more beyond the bottom line numbers. This is where “they will grow” stopped being a reference to an ‘80s movie and became a compounded impact.
When you ask a CFT to run structured check-ins, coach a struggling new hire and own a retention outcome, you’re asking them to do the things leaders do…before they’re leaders. They practice feedback. They practice accountability. They learn to read a person and a situation. And because the system ties results back to them, their impact gets seen by the people who make promotion decisions.
The result is a pipeline. Our CFT program runs around a 25 percent promotion rate: One in four CFTs moves into a leadership role as those roles open up, and we bring the next cohort in behind them. Even better, stepping into a CFT role is associated with promotion roughly 47 percent faster than for team members who never became one. This pipeline, in combination with our leadership development programs, creates leaders who have practiced before they even needed the skill.
So the flywheel turns. We retain more people. We prove the impact with hard numbers. Our CFTs get visible. They grow into leaders. And the next group steps up to do it again.
If you build it
The lesson is not about building a website. The lesson is to truly care and empower the people who truly drive the company. The lesson is refusing to accept an industry’s worst habit as inevitable.
You don’t need a giant budget or an outside vendor to start. You need three things: the honesty to admit you can’t see what’s happening in your most fragile 90 days, the willingness to hand ownership to peers instead of power and a partner who says, “we can build this.”
Don’t let the data hide. Build with it so they can grow.
