The Challenge
Coastline Hospitality Group owns and operates 19 resort hotels and boutique properties along the Gulf Coast and southeastern Atlantic seaboard, stretching from Galveston, Texas, to Charleston, South Carolina. With 2,800 employees across front desk, housekeeping, food and beverage, maintenance, spa, and management roles, Coastline is one of the largest independent hospitality employers in the region. Its workforce reflects the industry it serves: high-turnover, heavily frontline, linguistically diverse, and disproportionately young. Annual turnover hovers around 68%, with housekeeping and food and beverage departments exceeding 80% at several properties. Roughly 900 of the company's 2,800 employees are seasonal workers hired between March and May for the peak summer travel season, most of whom separate by October.
Benefits enrollment had been a chronic problem for years, and the numbers told a clear story. During the 2025 open enrollment period, only 58% of eligible employees completed benefits enrollment — meaning 1,176 workers who qualified for medical, dental, vision, and supplemental coverage either chose not to enroll or never finished the process. That figure was not driven by employees deliberately waiving coverage. Internal surveys showed that 74% of non-enrolled employees either did not understand their options, did not know they were eligible, or started the enrollment process but abandoned it before completion.
The root cause was a paper-based enrollment system that had not been meaningfully updated in over a decade. Each year during the six-week open enrollment window, HR coordinators at each property distributed paper benefits packets — 32-page booklets printed in English only — to all eligible employees. Employees were expected to review the booklet, select their coverage tier and plan options, complete a paper election form, and return the form to their property's HR office. For a housekeeping attendant working a 6 a.m. shift who spoke Spanish as a first language and had 30 minutes for lunch, this process was effectively inaccessible.
The language barrier was substantial. Approximately 40% of Coastline's workforce spoke Spanish as their primary language, with another 8% speaking Haitian Creole, and 5% speaking Vietnamese — concentrated at specific properties based on local labor markets. The English-only benefits booklets were incomprehensible to many of these employees. Several property HR coordinators had taken to offering informal translation during enrollment meetings, but the quality and consistency of these explanations varied wildly. A 2025 post-enrollment survey found that 61% of Spanish-speaking employees rated their understanding of their benefits options as "poor" or "very poor."
Seasonal workers were the hardest-hit group. Because their employment dates often fell outside the standard open enrollment window, seasonal employees were eligible for a special enrollment period triggered by their hire date. But the paper process had no mechanism for tracking individual enrollment windows or sending timely reminders. In practice, most seasonal workers received a benefits packet during their first-week orientation, set it aside in the middle of learning a new job, and never returned to it. The 2025 enrollment rate among seasonal employees was 31% — less than a third of those eligible.
The HR team was drowning. Coastline employed 11 HR professionals across its 19 properties, an average of one HR coordinator for every 255 employees. During the 2025 open enrollment period, property HR coordinators received a combined 3,400 benefits-related inquiries — questions about plan differences, dependent eligibility, cost comparisons, enrollment deadlines, and claim procedures. These questions arrived in person, by phone, by text message, and occasionally through sticky notes left on office doors. An analysis of HR time allocation showed that benefits-related questions consumed an average of 14 hours per week per coordinator during enrollment season. Outside of enrollment, the load dropped but never disappeared: benefits questions still accounted for roughly 6 hours per week per coordinator year-round, as employees dealt with life events, coverage questions, and claim issues.
The financial consequence extended beyond HR labor costs. Low enrollment rates meant Coastline was not maximizing its group purchasing power with insurance carriers. The company's benefits broker estimated that increasing enrollment from 58% to 80% or above would reduce per-employee premium costs by 9% due to improved risk pool distribution — a potential savings of $340,000 annually on employer-side premiums alone. Meanwhile, Coastline's competitors in the Gulf Coast hospitality market were increasingly advertising benefits access as a recruiting differentiator. Properties in Destin, Myrtle Beach, and Gulf Shores were competing for the same labor pool, and Coastline's inability to effectively deliver benefits to its workforce was becoming a retention liability.
The Solution
Coastline's VP of People, Rachel Dominguez, initiated a platform evaluation in mid-2025 with three requirements that could not be compromised: full multilingual support including guided enrollment in Spanish, Haitian Creole, Vietnamese, and English; a mobile-first experience designed for workers who did not have desktop computers or company email addresses; and AI-driven decision support that could help employees with no benefits literacy choose appropriate coverage without requiring an HR coordinator to walk them through it.
Workisy was selected for its integrated Benefits Administration and Employee Self-Service modules, with Compensation Planning added to the contract for a planned second-phase rollout. The platform met all three requirements natively, without requiring third-party integrations or custom development.
The self-service portal was configured as a mobile-first application accessible from any smartphone. Employees would authenticate using their phone number and a one-time verification code — no company email required, no complex passwords to remember. This was a deliberate design choice for a workforce where 82% of frontline employees did not have a company email address and 94% carried a personal smartphone. The portal served as a single destination for benefits enrollment, plan comparison, coverage verification, dependent management, and claims status tracking.
The guided enrollment experience was the core of the solution. Rather than presenting employees with a static document describing plan options, Workisy's benefits enrollment wizard walked each employee through a step-by-step, conversational flow. The wizard asked about household size, anticipated medical needs, prescription medications, preferred doctors, and monthly budget tolerance. Based on the responses, the AI recommendation engine ranked available plans by fit and displayed a side-by-side comparison highlighting estimated annual out-of-pocket costs, premium amounts, and coverage levels for the scenarios most relevant to that specific employee.
The entire experience was available in all four languages. Workisy's localization was not a machine translation overlay — plan descriptions, legal notices, and decision-support content were professionally translated and reviewed by native speakers in each language. An employee selecting Vietnamese as their preferred language saw the full enrollment experience, including plan summaries, cost calculators, and confirmation documents, rendered natively in Vietnamese. Language preference was stored in the employee's profile and applied across all future interactions with the portal.
For seasonal workers, Workisy's system was configured with individualized enrollment windows triggered by hire date. Each seasonal employee received an automatic enrollment notification on their personal phone within 48 hours of their start date, with reminders at 7, 14, and 21 days if enrollment remained incomplete. The reminders were sent via SMS in the employee's preferred language with a direct link to the enrollment wizard — a single tap to begin.
Workisy's compensation benchmarking tools, part of the Compensation Planning module, gave Coastline's leadership real-time market data on total compensation for hospitality roles across the Gulf Coast region. This addressed a secondary but strategically important goal: understanding whether Coastline's benefits package, once properly delivered, was competitive with properties in the same labor markets. The benchmarking dashboard pulled from aggregated compensation surveys and displayed Coastline's total compensation positioning — base pay plus benefits value — against market medians and percentiles for each role and geography.
The Implementation
Coastline and Workisy executed an eight-week rollout structured as a property-by-property deployment, timed to conclude before the 2026 open enrollment period in January.
Weeks one and two: Configuration and data migration. Workisy's implementation team configured the benefits plans, eligibility rules, enrollment windows, and carrier connections for all five insurance carriers and 14 plan options offered across the Coastline portfolio. Employee data for all 2,800 workers was migrated from the legacy HRIS, including hire dates, employment status, property assignment, language preference (where recorded), and existing benefits elections. Roughly 600 employee records had no language preference on file — these were flagged for collection during the property rollout.
Weeks three and four: Pilot at two properties. Coastline selected its Destin, Florida, resort (340 employees) and its Galveston, Texas, property (210 employees) as pilot sites. These properties were chosen for their workforce diversity: Destin had a predominantly English-speaking staff with a significant Spanish-speaking housekeeping team, while Galveston had the highest concentration of Vietnamese-speaking employees in the portfolio. The pilot served as a real-world stress test of the multilingual experience and the mobile enrollment flow. During the two-week pilot, 78% of eligible employees at both properties completed enrollment through the self-service portal. The most common support request — accounting for 40% of the 83 tickets generated — involved employees needing help with the initial phone number verification step, leading Workisy to add an in-app tutorial video for first-time access.
Weeks five through seven: Full portfolio rollout. The remaining 17 properties were activated in three waves, grouped by geography: Gulf Coast Texas and Louisiana (six properties), Gulf Coast Alabama and Florida panhandle (five properties), and Atlantic coast Florida through South Carolina (six properties). Each wave included on-property training sessions for HR coordinators and department managers. Training sessions ran 90 minutes and covered system administration, enrollment monitoring dashboards, and how to assist employees who needed hands-on support. Separate 20-minute sessions for frontline employees were conducted at shift changes in each property's break room, with bilingual facilitators for properties with significant non-English-speaking populations. Printed quick-start cards with QR codes linking to the enrollment portal were posted in break rooms, locker areas, and time clock stations at all 19 properties.
Week eight: Stabilization and open enrollment launch. The final week served as a buffer for resolving outstanding issues before the January open enrollment window opened. Workisy's support team ran a simulated enrollment for 50 employees across five properties to verify that elections flowed correctly to all five carriers. Three mapping errors were identified and corrected — a dental plan code had been transposed for one carrier, and two properties had incorrect effective dates for seasonal eligibility windows. The 2026 open enrollment opened on schedule on January 6.
The Results
The 2026 open enrollment period ran from January 6 through February 14 — six weeks. The results marked a fundamental shift in how Coastline's workforce engaged with their benefits.
Benefits enrollment reached 92%, up from 58%. Of the 2,800 employees eligible for benefits, 2,576 completed enrollment through the self-service portal. The 34-percentage-point increase represented 952 additional employees who enrolled compared to the prior year. Among full-time, year-round employees, enrollment hit 97%. Among seasonal workers — the population that had enrolled at just 31% the previous year — enrollment reached 79%, a 48-percentage-point improvement driven almost entirely by the automated SMS reminders and mobile-first enrollment experience.
HR ticket volume dropped 55%. During the 2026 open enrollment period, property HR coordinators received 1,530 benefits-related inquiries, down from 3,400 during the same period in 2025. The self-service portal's plan comparison tools, AI recommendations, and multilingual content resolved the majority of questions that had previously required a coordinator to answer in person. The average time each coordinator spent on benefits questions during enrollment season fell from 14 hours per week to 5.5 hours — freeing approximately 8.5 hours per coordinator per week that was redirected to onboarding, employee relations, and retention initiatives.
Employee satisfaction with the benefits experience reached 4.6 out of 5. A post-enrollment survey distributed through the self-service portal received a 71% response rate — itself a dramatic improvement over the 23% response rate for the prior year's paper survey. Among Spanish-speaking employees, satisfaction scored 4.7 out of 5, the highest of any language group, and the percentage rating their benefits understanding as "good" or "very good" jumped from 39% to 88%. Vietnamese-speaking employees showed a similarly dramatic improvement, from 34% comprehension satisfaction to 84%.
The AI recommendation engine was used by 81% of enrollees. Of the 2,576 employees who completed enrollment, 2,087 engaged with the plan recommendation wizard. Among those who used the wizard, 73% selected the plan ranked as their top recommendation — indicating that the decision-support tool was not just being viewed but was actively driving enrollment decisions. The most common outcome was employees selecting higher-value plans they had previously overlooked: enrollment in the PPO plan with lower deductibles increased by 22%, while enrollment in the bare-minimum catastrophic plan decreased by 18%.
Financial impact was significant. The increase from 58% to 92% enrollment improved Coastline's risk pool sufficiently for the benefits broker to negotiate a 7.5% reduction in per-employee premium costs at the next renewal cycle, projecting $285,000 in annual employer-side savings. HR labor cost savings from the 55% ticket reduction were estimated at $190,000 annually. Combined, the first-year financial benefit exceeded $475,000 against an implementation and licensing cost that Coastline's CFO described as "paid for itself before the first enrollment period closed."
Coastline also avoided a planned HR headcount expansion. Prior to the Workisy deployment, Dominguez had budgeted for two additional HR coordinators to manage the growing benefits workload across 19 properties, at a loaded cost of $156,000. The self-service portal eliminated the need for those hires, contributing an additional $156,000 in avoided cost.
What's Next
Coastline is moving into the second phase of its Workisy deployment: Compensation Planning. The immediate priority is using Workisy's market benchmarking tools to restructure seasonal pay rates for the 2026 summer hiring season. Preliminary data from the compensation dashboard showed that Coastline's seasonal housekeeping rates were 8% below market median for Gulf Coast properties and 12% below median for Atlantic coast properties — a gap that likely contributed to the difficulty filling seasonal positions in 2025, when 14% of approved seasonal roles went unfilled.
Dominguez's team is building property-specific compensation models that factor in base pay, benefits value, shift differentials, and tip-sharing structures to present a total compensation figure for each role. The goal is to move seasonal recruiting conversations from hourly rate comparisons to total compensation comparisons — a framing that favors Coastline now that 79% of seasonal workers are actually enrolled in benefits. The target is zero unfilled seasonal positions for summer 2026 and a 15% improvement in seasonal worker return rates year over year.
Client Quote
"We had a benefits package that was genuinely competitive for our market, but we were failing to deliver it to the people it was designed for. A 32-page English-only booklet is not a benefits communication strategy for a multilingual hospitality workforce — it's a barrier. When we saw that 74% of our non-enrolled employees either didn't understand their options or didn't finish the process, the problem was obvious: it was not that our people didn't want benefits, it was that we had made it too hard to get them. The self-service portal changed that equation completely. A housekeeper finishing her shift at two in the afternoon can sit in the break room, open the enrollment wizard on her phone in Spanish, get a recommendation tailored to her family's needs, and complete enrollment in twelve minutes. We went from 58% to 92% enrollment not because we changed our benefits — we changed how people access them. The HR team went from fielding thirty benefits calls a day to focusing on the work that actually requires a human being. That is what a well-deployed platform should do: remove the friction between your people and the things you are already offering them."
Rachel Dominguez, VP of People, Coastline Hospitality Group