What the Data at ISHC Rome Says About Italy's Hospitality Market
By Christian Scali , Italy Access Advisory
This week's International Society of Hospitality Consultants (ISHC) Annual Conference in Rome brought together consultants, operators, and researchers from across the industry, and with them a useful amount of hard data on where the Italian hospitality market stands.
Pulling the numbers together from several of the conference's data-driven sessions tells a consistent story: Italy is outperforming most of its European peers on almost every measure that matters to an investor, and the market still has room to run.
Performance: Italy Is Leading Southern Europe
HotStats, presenting global performance data through CEO Michael Grove, put a number on something many of us in this market have felt anecdotally for a while. Since the last World Cup in 2022, hotel profitability (measured by Gross Operating Profit per Available Room, or GOPPAR) has grown faster in Italy than anywhere else in Southern Europe: up 77%, compared with 63% in Portugal and 46% in Spain.
For an investor comparing markets, that gap says as much about pricing power and cost discipline as it does about demand. Italy isn't just seeing more visitors than its neighbors; it's converting that demand into profit at a noticeably higher rate. That profitability shows up at the property level too. HotStats puts the average Gross Operating Profit (GOP) margin for an Italian hotel in 2026 at 43.6%, with payroll running 25.4% of revenue, other operating expenses at 21.7%, and cost of sales at 9.3%, strong numbers by any standard.
Demand: Growing While Other Markets Slow
David Goodger of Tourism Economics presented 2026 inbound arrivals forecasts by market, and Italy's base-case projection of 12% growth, with 15% upside and 7% downside scenarios, stands out against nearly every major European market on the same slide.
| Market | Base case | Upside | Downside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Italy | 12% | 15% | 7% |
| Spain | 10% | 12% | 6% |
| France | 3% | 5% | -1% |
| Germany | 2% | 4% | -3% |
| United Kingdom | 2% | 5% | -6% |
Source: David Goodger, Tourism Economics, “What Endures, What Evolves: Global Data & Long-term Forecast,” ISHC Rome, 2026 inbound arrivals, year-over-year growth.
Chris Fair of Resonance Consultancy added a longer view on the same theme. Italy ranks third worldwide in “visit desire,” a measure of a country's share of global travel-interest mentions, at 13.0% in 2025 and projected to reach 13.4% by 2027. Only Japan ranks higher across both years, rising from 14.6% to 18.0%. The United States currently ranks second at 17.1% in 2025, but Fair's data projects that share falling to 14.3% by 2027, a reversal that would put Italy within a point of the U.S. by then. Spain, France, and the U.K. are all projected to see the same kind of decline over the same period.
Rome: From Volume to Value
Massimo Caputi, president of Federturismo Confindustria, gave the clearest picture of what's happening at the city level. Rome drew 52.9 million tourist presences in 2025, plus another 25.1 million in the first half of 2026, a share equal to 9.4% of all tourist presences nationwide. One city accounts for nearly one in ten visits to the entire country.
The investment case is just as strong. Italian hotel investment reached €2.5 billion in 2025, up 19% year-over-year and 35% above the ten-year average. Rome alone accounted for €630 million of that, roughly a quarter of the national total, with international investors responsible for 53% of that capital.
The quality of that growth is shifting too. Rome added 14 new five-star hotels in 2025 and 2026, about 1,500 new rooms, and five-star arrivals reached 1.4 million in 2025, up 5.9% year-over-year. Four- and five-star hotels now account for 67% of all rooms sold in the city. Caputi's own framing captures the moment well: “Rome is not facing a demand problem. It is facing a value-conversion challenge.” The next phase of growth needs to come from higher-quality spending across the same base of visitors.
A Longer Season, Driven by the Climate
One theme ran through several sessions: the traditional summer peak is shifting. Caputi's own presentation, drawing on OECD and Data Appeal Mabrian research, described 40°C-plus heatwaves pushing sightseeing into early mornings and evenings across the Mediterranean, Italy included, while shoulder seasons in spring and autumn gain ground on the traditional July and August peak. Rome's strategic response, in Caputi's words, is to become a “12-month city,” treating de-seasonalization as an industrial strategy rather than a marketing idea.
That shift is arriving alongside a policy response to overtourism. Rome introduced a €2 entry fee for the Trevi Fountain basin area in February 2026, and Venice's day-tripper fee now runs as high as €10 on peak days. Italy has joined Spain, Greece, France, the Netherlands, and Austria in a broader 2026 wave of tourist taxes and visitor caps, a trend playing out across the region y.
Next Up: ITHIC
All of this is genuinely good news for anyone invested in Italian hospitality, and it's worth taking seriously. It's also, without exception, hotel specific data. HotStats' benchmarking, Tourism Economics' arrivals modeling, and Federturismo's investment figures are all built on hotel performance, hotel transactions, and hotel room inventory.
The economic and financial data for villas differ from hotels. Pricing is set per property, per booking, for exclusive use of the entire villa, so nightly room rate and an occupancy percentage, the building blocks behind GOPPAR and GOP margin, don't have an equivalent to measure. Occupancy rate is more sensitive to marketing and PR efforts. And staffing and staff training costs are often a greater percentage of operating costs. Ownership tends to be private and independent rather than institutional, so villas rarely enter the transaction data investment firms track or the benchmarking pools that platforms like HotStats depend on.
That distinction matters for anyone weighing a villa investment against the hotel benchmarks above: the two are not being measured on the same terms, and any comparison should account for that. I will be at the Italian Hospitality Investment Conference (ITHIC) in Milan next week, hoping to hear villa-specific performance and investment data, though outside of branded residences within a hotel property or villas within a resort complex, I am highly skeptical that any such aggregated data exists.
About the Authors
Christian Scali is the co-founder of Italy Access Advisory and the founder and managing shareholder of Scali Rasmussen, a California business law firm he built in 2013. He has practiced law in California since 1998, with a practice spanning retail automotive litigation and transactions alongside a growing international practice in cross-border tax planning and market entry. He was named a 2026 Southern California Super Lawyer and recognized as a Legal Visionary by the Los Angeles Times. Christian is also the founder of LV Toscana, the hospitality management company behind Villa Ardore, the historic Chianti property he restored and now operates, the hands-on experience behind Italy Access Advisory.