Something changed quietly in the hospitality world last year, and it barely made headlines outside the trade press. The United Kingdom effectively closed its sponsorship route for new chefs in the middle of 2025, cutting off one of Europe's oldest paths for talent coming from abroad. There was no dramatic announcement, no single policy reversal everyone could point to, just a door that used to swing open now mostly staying shut. We noticed, because doors like that rarely close in isolation. They usually say something about where the bigger story is heading.
The bigger story is hard to miss once you look at the numbers. Travel and tourism now support roughly 366 million jobs worldwide, something like one in every nine jobs on the planet, and international arrivals passed 1.52 billion last year, up 4 percent from the year before. This is not a sector shrinking into caution. It is one that keeps adding rooms, tables and kitchens faster than it can staff them.
A Gap Measured in the Tens of Millions
A 2026 industry report on international chef hiring put a number on just how wide that gap could get. It projected 91 million new travel and tourism roles by 2035, against a possible shortfall of 43 million workers to fill them. Numbers that large can sound abstract, but they translate into something very concrete for anyone training as a chef or hotel professional right now. Demand for real, trained skill is not going anywhere. If anything, it is becoming the scarcest ingredient in the industry.
Doors Closing, and Doors Opening
The UK's pullback is one market tightening its welcome mat. Plenty of others are doing the opposite. The same 2026 report lists sponsored chef salaries climbing well past 80,000 US dollars a year in Switzerland, Australia setting a minimum sponsored salary floor around 50,000 US dollars, and New Zealand building a defined 24 month path from work visa to residency specifically for hospitality roles. The Gulf region, the United States and the cruise industry, which just carried a record 37.2 million passengers for a fourth straight year of growth, are all hiring kitchen talent at a pace that has little patience for a slower global labor market.
None of this is lost on Italy. Our istituto alberghiero system has spent generations turning out chefs and hotel staff trained to a standard few countries can replicate at scale, five years of hands on kitchen labs and real service before a single diploma is handed out. When one door closes somewhere in Europe, that training does not stop traveling. It simply finds a market still asking for it, and right now the United States is asking louder than most, with hotel and restaurant groups actively competing to bring in chefs and experienced hospitality staff from abroad.
This is the exact gap our recruitment team spends every day working inside, matching Italian chefs and hospitality professionals with US employers who are hiring right now, and walking both sides through the visa process so a strong match on paper actually becomes someone standing in a real kitchen. The shortage the data describes is, from where we sit, also a genuine opening for the people and employers ready to act on it.
Data referenced from UN Tourism, the World Travel and Tourism Council, and ChefJobs Abroad's 2026 International Chef Jobs Report.
A closed door in one country has never been the end of the story for Italian hospitality talent. It has only ever meant the next door was somewhere else, and usually hiring faster.