Hotel and restaurant staff scheduling in the EU and Greece: building the rota around demand

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From demand to names, in five steps

1. 1Forecast the week: bookings and expected occupancy, covers per service, events and groups. Check against the same week last year.
2. 2Turn the forecast into people per hour for each department — front desk, housekeeping, kitchen, restaurant floor.
3. 3Shape the shifts to that curve: overlapping shifts at the peaks rather than one flat working day. A front desk covered round the clock needs three shifts a day, every day.
4. 4Place the fixed items first — people with set hours, approved leave, rest days — then fill the peaks with part-time and seasonal staff.
5. 5Check the rules below, declare the schedule where the law requires it (in Greece, to ΕΡΓΑΝΗ) and publish as early as you can.

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The EU rules every hospitality rota must pass

• Daily rest: at least 11 consecutive hours in every 24 (Directive 2003/88/EC, article 3). A bar shift ending at 01:00 followed by a 09:00 breakfast shift leaves 8 — the classic hospitality mistake.
• Breaks: a rest break when the working day is longer than six hours (article 4).
• Weekly rest: 24 hours plus the 11 of daily rest in every 7 days, which may be assessed over 14 days (articles 5 and 16).
• Average week: no more than 48 hours, including overtime, over a reference period of up to four months (articles 6 and 16).
• Paid annual leave of at least four weeks for every worker, seasonal staff included (article 7).

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What Greece adds

• Breaks start earlier: 15 to 30 minutes once work goes beyond 4 consecutive hours (Labour Code, article 172 §1).
• Split shifts: a full-time employee on split hours gets at least 3 hours between the two parts (article 172 §3); a part-time employee with shorter daily hours works them in one continuous block, once a day (article 113 §7).
• Seasonal hotel and food-service businesses may make written part-time contracts for a daily or weekly working period (article 113 §5).
• The sixth-day exception for five-day businesses (+40%) does not apply to hotels and food service (articles 191 §4 and 192 §4).
• The schedule and every change to it are registered in ΕΡΓΑΝΗ ΙΙ before the employee starts work (article 581 §1). The Digital Work Card rules for tourism and food service are in the hotel and restaurant guides.

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Keeping the rota fair

• Rotate weekends, late closes and early starts so they do not always fall on the same people.
• Handle shift swaps through an approval step, so the published rota stays true and a swap cannot break someone’s rest.

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Hospitality rosters in 365shift

• Each hotel or outlet is a team with its own posts; the “Only certain posts” rule keeps people to the departments they work in.
• Save a week’s shifts as a template, or copy a week, a month or any range of days and paste it, with or without the same people.
• Leave and day-off requests for the period on screen appear above the roster; “Place” writes the leave into the roster.
• The “Minimum rest between shifts” rule (11 hours by default) flags a late close followed by an early start; “Max hours per week” blocks assignments above the cap.