The Staff in a Staffed House
The staff in a Greek villa are employed by the owner or by the company that manages the house, not by the guest. Three things follow. Their hours and rest periods are set by Greek employment law rather than by the week that has been taken; their instructions come from their employer; and what they are there to do is whatever the letting agreement says, which is usually narrower than a guest assumes. A written schedule of who does what, and when, prevents nearly every dispute that arises in a staffed house.
Who the employer is
In almost every staffed house in Greece, the staff work for the owner or for the company that manages the property. They do not work for the guest, and the week does not make them do so.
That is not a technicality. It settles who gives instructions, who resolves a difficulty, whose insurance covers an accident, and who a guest raises a concern with when something is wrong. The answer to the last of those is the owner’s representative — the house manager, the agent or the management company — and not the person cooking dinner.
There is a second reason it matters. A guest who instructs staff directly on hours, duties or terms is instructing somebody else’s employees on matters their own employer has agreed with them. It rarely ends in a formal problem, and it routinely ends in an uncomfortable house.
What Greek law fixes
Some of what a staffed house can and cannot do is not negotiable, because it is employment law rather than hospitality.
Every employee in Greece must have a written contract of employment, be declared through the ERGANI system and be insured with e-EFKA, the national social security fund. Employers file a monthly declaration of earnings and contributions.
Working time is regulated. Employees are entitled to 11 consecutive hours of rest in each 24-hour period and to at least 24 hours of uninterrupted rest in each week. Working hours, overtime, rest and leave are set by law and cannot be signed away by contract.
Pay has a floor. The minimum wage rose on 1 April 2026 to €920 gross a month for salaried employees, paid across the Greek system of 14 payments a year.
Read together, these produce the fact that most surprises guests: a household of staff cannot simply be available for 16 hours a day for 10 days. A house that appears to offer that is either rotating people the guest has not been told about, or it is doing something its staff will pay for later.
What “fully staffed” does not tell you
The phrase has no fixed meaning. It is used to describe houses whose arrangements have almost nothing in common.
A cook who prepares breakfast and leaves is a different house from a chef who cooks three meals. Daily housekeeping is different from a change of linen twice a week. A boatman who runs the tender on request is different from one attached to the house all day. A house manager living on site is a different proposition again from one who visits each morning.
Each of those is a perfectly good arrangement. None of them is implied by the words “fully staffed”, so the words are worth replacing with a list.
The list worth having in writing
Six lines settle nearly everything.
- Who is in the house, by role.
- What each of them does, in specific terms — meals, laundry, cleaning, driving, the boat, the children.
- When they are there, including their days off and who covers those days.
- Where they sleep, and whether they live on site.
- What is outside their duties — the questions where the honest answer is no.
- Who to speak to about all of it, with a name and a telephone number.
A house that produces that list without difficulty is a well-run house. A house that answers in adjectives has told you something too.
Privacy runs both ways
A staffed house is somebody’s workplace and somebody else’s holiday at the same time, and the two are managed by convention rather than by rules.
Staff in good houses are practised at being invisible, and guests are rarely prepared for how much of that is a skill. The arrangements that make it work are small and worth agreeing early: which parts of the house are the staff’s own, when the family wants the house to itself, how the day begins, how requests are made and to whom.
The corresponding obligation runs to the guest. The people in the house see everything, and they are professionals who do not talk about it. A household that treats that discretion as owed rather than earned is a household that loses it.
Gratuities and the end of the stay
Practice varies between houses and between agents, and the sensible time to ask is at the point of booking rather than on the last morning.
The question to put to the agent is simply how gratuities are handled in that particular house: whether anything is included in the letting, whether they are given to individuals or shared, and who they are given through. Every good agent has a clear answer. The awkwardness only ever arises when nobody asked.
What to settle before arrival
- The written schedule above — who, what, when, and their days off.
- Meals. Which ones, how many people, and how far in advance the kitchen wants to know.
- Dietary requirements and allergies, in writing, before the shopping is done.
- Children. Whether anybody in the house looks after them, and whether that person is qualified and insured to do it — a question with one correct answer and it is not “everyone helps”.
- Who holds the budget for provisioning, and how it is accounted for at the end.