Italy's hotel sector is having one of its best years in a decade. Investment in Italian hospitality real estate is projected to reach nearly 91.5 billion euros in 2026, and 2025 alone brought the highest hotel investment volumes the country has seen in five years, according to a Q1 2026 analysis from the GRI Institute. New luxury properties are opening in Rome and Milan, historic villas in Tuscany are being converted into boutique hotels, and average daily rates in the top cities now rival any market in Europe.
But walk into the back of house at many of these properties and you will find a different story. The same report found that unfilled hospitality positions in Italy roughly tripled between 2019 and 2024, and the roles hardest to fill are exactly the ones a hotel cannot run without, chefs and front office staff. Labor costs have climbed in response, now accounting for more than a third of revenue at many city center properties. Italy is building hotels faster than it can staff them.
A Shortage That Money Alone Doesn't Fix
Hotel groups are responding the way any industry does when it can't find enough people, with money. Signing bonuses are becoming common, and several operators are building partnerships with vocational colleges to grow their own pipeline of cooks and hospitality graduates. Those moves help, but they take years to change the shape of the workforce, and in the meantime the properties opening this year and next still need staff on day one.
The Same Talent, More Options
This is the part of the story that matters most for anyone trying to hire, whether the property is in Rome or in Chicago. Well trained Italian chefs and hospitality professionals are not short of demand. If Italy's own market can't absorb them fast enough, or can't offer the wage and career growth they're looking for, they look elsewhere, and increasingly that means abroad. Hotels and restaurants outside Italy that build a real relationship with Italian training pipelines, rather than posting a job and hoping, are the ones who end up with the strongest kitchens and front desks.
For employers, the lesson isn't to wait for Italy's staffing gap to close. It's to treat sourcing from a proven talent pool as infrastructure, the same way a hotel treats its booking engine or its supply chain, something built ahead of the need rather than scrambled together when a position opens.
Data referenced from a GRI Institute Q1 2026 report on the Italian hotel and hospitality real estate market.
This is exactly the gap we spend our days working in at ItalianExperience, matching vetted Italian chefs and hospitality professionals with employers abroad and walking both sides through the visa process that so often stalls a good hire before it ever starts.
The hotels being built fastest right now are not always the ones that will be staffed fastest, and that gap is where the opportunity lives.