What is it about?
We usually ask whether employees working in tourism are happy with their lives. This study asks a different question: what about the people who live with them? Using 20 years of European Social Survey data — around 404,000 people across 30 countries — we looked at how working in tourism relates to life satisfaction, both for workers and for their partners. The surprise: once you account for income, education and other circumstances, tourism workers themselves are no less satisfied than anyone else. But their partners are. People whose partner works in tourism report noticeably lower life satisfaction — a gap we call the "partner penalty." Strikingly, it is larger than the dip typically associated with divorce. The penalty is not spread evenly. It falls mainly on men and on families with children and elderly relatives to care for. Couples where both partners work in tourism do not experience the partner penalty at all. The most likely explanation is not stress or attitudes — it seems time: tourism's long, unpredictable, weekend and last-minute hours quietly erode shared family time and social life. For more insights check out our Open Access article (free of charge) by clicking on the → Read button below this summary.
Featured Image
Photo by Jayanth Muppaneni on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Tourism is wrestling with chronic labour shortages, and the debate usually circles back to pay. Our findings suggest pay isn't the whole story — and that wellbeing in this sector is a household matter, not just an individual one. The strain of irregular schedules spills over onto partners and children, shaping decisions about whether to stay in a job or leave it. That reframes the solution. We estimate that compensating partners purely with money would mean lifting household income by more than three deciles — unrealistic. What actually targets the problem is time: family-friendly scheduling, predictable shifts, childcare that fits unusual hours, and extending workplace benefits to partners. For employers, this is a retention strategy hiding in plain sight; for policymakers, a case for incentivising family-supportive practices. Understanding the partner penalty helps the industry keep people — by looking after the families behind them.
Perspectives
This project grew out of a simple observation: so much tourism workforce research stops at the office or the front desk, yet the real weight of unsocial hours is often carried at the kitchen table at home. We wanted to make the invisible partner visible. The finding that genuinely moved us was that occupational understanding matters — when both partners share the rhythm of tourism work, there is no penalty. It hints that what people miss most is not money but presence and being understood. We hope this opens a more honest conversation about what "good work" in tourism really requires and inspires research that listens to partners and families directly.
Dr. Eva Vroegop
Fondazione Campus, Lucca, Italy
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The partner penalty: Exploring tourism jobs and life satisfaction relationships, Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights, May 2026, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.annale.2026.100221.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
