In late September, Hotel Quark in Milan hosted the eighth edition of ITHIC, the Italian Hospitality Investment Conference. Over two days, more than 1,400 delegates and 150 investors from more than twenty five countries did what hospitality investment conferences usually do best: talked about buildings, valuations and new openings. One panel on October 1st spent its time on something harder to put a number on. People.
That panel, called Investing in People, Unlocking Asset Value, was built around a foundation most people outside Italian hospitality had not heard of a year ago. Fondazione HEREDITAS ETS was set up by notarial deed on May 26th in Stresa, on the shore of Lake Maggiore, by eleven companies that usually compete for the same guests and the same staff, among them BWH Hotels Italia, Duetorrihotels, Planetaria Hotels, HNH Hospitality and Zacchera Hotels. For once, eleven direct competitors agreed on something bigger than any single brand. Italy needed a real school for the managers who will run its hotels a decade from now, and nobody was going to build it for them.
Why Hoteliers Decided to Become Teachers
The reasoning behind HEREDITAS is simple enough to say out loud at a conference and hard enough to fix that it took eleven companies to try. Italian hospitality has plenty of people willing to work a front desk or wait a table, but a thinner bench of managers ready to run a property, read a balance sheet, and lead a team through a tough season. Add a wave of owners and general managers approaching retirement, and the gap between classroom training and what a hotel actually needs on a Tuesday in high season gets wider every year. Rather than wait for a university or a ministry to close it, the founding companies decided to fund, design and staff the solution themselves. They put in the money, help write the curriculum, and commit to taking on interns and scholarship students as a direct pipeline into their own properties.
The institutional seat sits in Stresa, with a teaching campus in nearby Baveno built on the legacy of HOSPES and the historic Istituto Alberghiero Erminio Maggia, a hotel school with real roots in the area. The curriculum leans on the fundamentals of hotel management, then adds the parts a classical hospitality diploma rarely covers in depth: revenue management, digital marketing, data analytics and artificial intelligence in hospitality operations. HEREDITAS is also lining up an international layer, with a planned collaboration with HIM Business School in Montreux so graduates can measure themselves against international standards, not only domestic ones.
Training Money Follows the Talent, Not Just the Brand
A meaningful share of what HEREDITAS is funding is scholarships, aimed specifically at capable students who could not otherwise afford the path, so that family income decides less of who gets to become a hotel manager in Italy. At the ITHIC panel, BWH Hotels Italia and South East Europe CEO Sara Digiesi made the point that framed the whole discussion: a hotel's long term value comes from the people who run it and grow it, not only from the real estate underneath it. For an industry used to measuring itself in square meters and average daily rates, that is a notable thing for eleven competing companies to say together, and an even more notable thing to fund together.
It is also exactly the shift we see every day from the recruitment side of this business. The hospitality talent coming out of schools like this, trained in both the floor and the fundamentals of running a property, is precisely who international employers ask us to find when they need department heads and managers, not just extra hands for the season. Once a hotel abroad has identified that kind of candidate, the harder part is usually getting them a visa, which is where the rest of our work with employers and candidates begins.
Details on Fondazione HEREDITAS and the ITHIC panel referenced here were drawn from reporting by Qualitytravel.it and Hotel Bristol Palace.
Hotels can be built in a couple of years. The people who make them worth visiting take longer, and eleven Italian hospitality companies just decided that was worth doing properly.