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Pere Torrens, RIU’s Director of Training: “The future of the hotel industry is all about focusing on people”
28 March, 2025 Share
Today we bring you an interview with Pere Torrens, our Director of Training at RIU Hotels, in which we highlight the important work this department does for our company.
It is undeniable that the hotel industry is facing a major challenge at the global level: difficulties attracting and retaining talent. At RIU we are aware that the human touch and a people-centred approach are factors that can make all the difference and so, in the words of our colleague Pere Torrens, “The future of the hotel industry is all about focusing on people.”
As you know, RIU is a family company and, like almost all businesses of this type, it has very clear values that are transmitted in the day-to-day running of the organisation. But we are, at the same time, a multinational company: “It is important to transmit our culture and values to every last corner of RIU in order to uphold our brand standards, as we have 38,000 employees working in 98 hotels located in 21 countries around the world”, explains Pere.
Inside RIU’s Training Department
There are currently 8 people in RIU’s training department. They are responsible for helping senior managers select personnel for corporate offices and for coordinating and designing training activities for the entire chain as well as personal development programmes. According to Pere, “We develop the training courses on demand according to the needs of the company. We test them, we evaluate them, we redesign them, and we help with their implementation, but we rely on the company’s structure for their delivery. This means the human resources teams in each destination, the hotel management teams, the production departments, the Health, Safety and Sustainability supervisors, and even external suppliers. We would not accomplish anything on our own, but wherever we go with RIU we always find people willing to collaborate and do their utmost to share knowledge. I think this is also a hallmark of RIU. I definitely have not seen this willingness in all the companies I have been in.”
Other than relying on the company’s organisational structure to reach everyone, the other cornerstone of training are the middle managers and supervisors: “They are the real training directors”, Pere always says. Because “they are the ones who make it possible for behaviour, like welcoming new employees or properly following procedures, to be repeated by the rest of the team, in the workplace, and in all our locations.”
Pere explains that the number of hours of training logged increases every year: “We have gone up from 190,000 hours in 2023 to 260,000 hours in 2024. Most of this is classroom time.” To these hours we must add those undertaken during the opening of hotels and the periods of on-the-job training. “If we added them all together, we would double or triple these figures”, says Pere.
RIU’s PIT Programme in Mexico: an example of training internal talent
In this key destination for the Mallorcan company, where RIU has a total of 22 hotels, there is a very dynamic labour market, with low unemployment rates, wage increases, and so on. All this, explains Pere, “causes a lot of job rotation in entry-level positions and affects the culture and values I mentioned earlier, which can cause us to lose service quality.” To mitigate this trend, he points out that “last year, a six-week paid dual training programme was implemented for young people, mostly aged between 18 and 30, where we taught them a profession. When they finished, they received a diploma and a job at a RIU hotel.” He goes on to explain that “The Kitchen Production department creates the content and supervises the hotel trainers. Operations assigned some of our most talented staff exclusively to training: the PIT (or Talent Incorporation Programme) is an Operations programme to train the basic staff needed by the hotels and the Kitchen Production and Human Resources departments, and we support each other in what we do best.”
An effective programme for reducing employee turnover
“It has been a real success”, Pere confesses. “This programme has drastically reduced turnover in the Latin American country, by about 50% compared to hiring people directly off the street, as people are more motivated to learn a profession and watch their career progress. On top of this, we have seen that they engage better and identify more with our brand. After all, everyone wants to feel like they are working for more than just a salary. We want to feel part of something.”
With programmes like this, RIU should be able to inspire young people and its own employees and show them that the tourism industry, which is synonymous with happiness, offers worthwhile professional careers, rapid growth and international mobility in leading companies such as RIU.
The future of training at RIU: focused on people
In a world where processes are increasingly automated, where we as people constantly interact with technology, and this leaves us feeling empty, Pere is clear that “the future of the hotel industry is about focusing on people.”
He finishes by saying that “Our goal is to build loyalty among our talent and help our employees progress so that they know how to transmit this warmth, this human touch that is now more important than ever.”
RIU’s Training department will keep refining and improving its training and development programmes in line with the company’s sustainability strategy, Proudly Committed, to ensure “that RIU continues to be a company that offers extraordinary experiences through our people.”
