Switzerland has reached a record level of hotel overnight stays while continuing to lose hotels. The paradox points to an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant in Italy as well: for a growing share of small and mid-sized hotel owners, the real question will no longer be simply how much a hotel is worth, but who can buy it, with what capital and through what financial structure.
In 2025, Switzerland recorded 43.9 million hotel overnight stays, the highest level in its history.
At the same time, the number of hotel establishments continued to decline.
Demand is growing. Hotels are disappearing.
There is no contradiction.
It is the clearest sign of a structural shift: the hotel market is not shrinking. It is consolidating.
Overall room supply is increasing, hotel groups are expanding, more professional operators are entering the market and operating standards are rising.
The properties gradually leaving the market are mainly small and mid-sized independent hotels: often family-owned, frequently seasonal, carrying deferred capital expenditure, under pressure on margins and facing unresolved succession issues.
This is where Switzerland becomes a particularly useful lens through which to look at what may also happen in Italy.
The real problem is not selling a hotel. It is making it buyable
Hotel succession is usually described as a family issue.
The owner reaches a certain age.
The next generation chooses a different career.
The hotel is put up for sale.
But that is only the final act.
The real problem often started ten years earlier.
During the final years of ownership, it is understandable for proprietors to reduce investment. Major maintenance is postponed. Guestrooms age. Positioning weakens. Technology and distribution capabilities fall behind.
By the time a buyer appears, that buyer is not simply financing the purchase price.
They may need to finance, at the same time:
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acquisition;
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refurbishment;
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repositioning;
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working capital;
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technology;
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distribution;
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management transition;
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potential operating losses during the first few years.
This is where many transactions stop.
A hotel can have a perfectly understandable real estate value while still being difficult to finance as an operating business.
This distinction is central to the approach to hotel valuation discussed on RobertoNecci.it.
A hotel is not simply a building.
It is simultaneously real estate, an operating company, an organisation, a hospitality product, a market position and a future stream of cash flows.
This is why the key question is not simply:
“How much is my hotel worth?”
It is:
“How much of that value can actually be financed by the person expected to buy it?”
Those are two very different questions.
A hotel can be worth €6 million and still be impossible to sell for €6 million
Consider a hotel with a theoretical value of €6 million.
The owner wants to sell.
The buyer has €1.5 million of equity.
The property requires a further €2 million of investment to become competitive.
Historical cash flow is insufficient for the bank to finance both the acquisition and the required capex.
The seller does not want to invest because they are exiting the business.
The buyer cannot sensibly commit the refurbishment capital before taking control of the asset.
The bank is unwilling to finance the full future value because that future depends on investments that have not yet been made.
The outcome is straightforward:
the hotel may be worth €6 million, but nobody can actually buy it for €6 million.
That does not necessarily mean the asking price is wrong.
It means that the transaction structure does not work.
This is where instruments such as the following become decisive:
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vendor financing;
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earn-outs;
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lease-to-own structures;
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leases with purchase options;
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temporary seller participation;
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quasi-equity;
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staged acquisitions;
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separation of real estate ownership from the operating business.
The hotel transaction market of the coming years will increasingly move beyond traditional brokerage.
It will become a market for financial and industrial structuring.
The 75-room threshold shows where the market starts to break down
The Swiss market offers another revealing number.
Some professional operators indicate around 75 rooms as the minimum size at which an acquisition becomes attractive.
This is not a universal rule.
But economically, it says a great deal.
Above a certain scale, the cost of revenue management, marketing, administration, technology, management control, maintenance and commercial leadership can be spread across a sufficient room base.
Below that scale, the economics change.
The 20-to-50-room segment is probably the most exposed.
Too large to survive purely through family labour.
Too small to support a full professional management structure.
Too small to attract a significant part of institutional and professional capital.
Too complex to be treated as a simple real estate asset.
Too dependent on the owner to be transferred without preparation.
It becomes a genuine grey zone in hotel capital markets.
And this is precisely the segment in which Italy is likely to face a significant part of its own succession challenge.
The answer cannot always be a sale.
In some cases, management agreements may be more rational.
In others, an operating lease.
Elsewhere, a new investor, a separation between ownership and operations, or a staged transfer of control may be the better solution.
This is also the logic behind InvestHotel.it: before looking for someone to buy a hotel, you first need to understand what type of transaction that hotel can realistically support.
Fourteen people positioned exactly where the market stops working
The most significant institutional difference between Italy and Switzerland becomes clear when looking at the Swiss Society for Hotel Credit, SGH.
In 2025, SGH recorded:
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CHF 37.4 million in approved loans;
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approximately CHF 210 million in investment volumes activated;
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89 completed advisory mandates;
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roughly CHF 220 million in outstanding loans;
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more than CHF 1.17 billion in investment projects assessed.
Its workforce:
14 people.
That may be the most important number of all.
Fourteen professionals form a permanent centre of expertise able to speak the language of hotel owners, investors and banks at the same time.
SGH is not simply a grant-distribution mechanism.
Its financing must be repaid.
Its role is to intervene where conventional capital becomes more cautious: hotel SMEs, seasonal operations, investment-heavy properties, succession situations and transactions with complex financing needs.
In other words, it operates in the gap between the hotel and the bank.
That gap remains largely uncovered in Italy.
Italy finances investment. It is far less equipped to finance ownership transfers
Italy has no shortage of financial support tools.
FRI-Tur, the SME Guarantee Fund, European funding programmes, regional measures, energy-related incentives and tax schemes have mobilised substantial amounts of capital.
But most of them answer the same question:
how do we finance an investment?
Renovation.
Energy efficiency.
Digitalisation.
Refurbishment.
Hotel succession presents a different problem:
how do we finance the transfer of the business itself?
This is an equity problem.
A risk-allocation problem.
A financial-structure problem.
A management-capability problem.
And a problem involving the relationship between real estate value and operating cash flow.
It is not necessarily solved by increasing public subsidies.
Transactions need to be structured so that seller, buyer, bank and capital provider each assume a sustainable share of the risk.
This is the real difference between financing a hotel and making a hotel transaction possible.
Banks should not see only the real estate
A hotel cannot be analysed solely through square metres, real estate comparables and loan-to-value ratios.
These metrics matter.
But hotel investment ultimately depends on the operating business's ability to generate earnings.
That means analysing:
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ADR;
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occupancy;
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RevPAR;
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GOP;
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GOPPAR;
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seasonality;
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labour costs;
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distribution mix;
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OTA dependency;
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management quality;
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deferred capex;
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market positioning;
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repositioning potential;
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normalised cash flow.
The question therefore becomes:
“How much can this hotel generate after the investments required to make it competitive again?”
That answer, combined with the real estate value, determines how much debt the transaction can realistically support.
The problem is not being small. It is being small and indistinguishable
Small scale does not automatically condemn a hotel.
The Swiss market offers interesting examples of properties successfully repositioned without major real estate investment.
The Seiler’s Vintage Hotel in Kandersteg is a particularly useful case.
A previously sound but largely undifferentiated hotel was repositioned around the imagery of the 1960s and 1970s.
Vinyl records.
A jukebox.
A coherent food concept.
Storytelling.
A recognisable guest experience.
The lesson is straightforward:
the problem is not always lack of capital. Sometimes it is lack of choice.
A small hotel with a distinctive identity can develop pricing power.
A small hotel that looks and sounds like every other hotel is far more likely to compete primarily on price.
That distinction is likely to become even more important.
In the age of AI, generic hotels risk becoming invisible
For years, the hospitality industry has focused heavily on the relationship between OTAs and direct booking.
That remains relevant.
But a second transformation is now emerging: algorithmic recommendation.
Travellers can increasingly ask an AI system:
“Which small hotel is best for a couple interested in design?”
“Where can I stay in an independent hotel with a genuinely distinctive experience?”
“Which hotel should I choose if I want to avoid standardised hospitality?”
At that point, words such as authentic, welcoming, family-run, central, charming and unique experience differentiate very little.
If one hundred hotels use the same language, none of them truly owns that language.
A hotel that cannot explain quickly who it is for and why it is different becomes harder to select.
Positioning therefore stops being merely a marketing issue.
It becomes part of the economic value of the asset.
This is also why management, strategy, organisation, marketing and capital need to be considered together, within an integrated approach such as that developed by HotelManagementGroup.it.
Revenue can rise while enterprise value falls
The Swiss case also challenges another common assumption.
More overnight stays do not automatically mean more value.
A hotel can increase revenue and RevPAR while weakening its ability to generate capital.
If labour, energy, commissions, maintenance, interest costs and compliance expenses rise, a growing share of incremental revenue is absorbed before reaching operating profit.
This is why RevPAR without GOP and GOPPAR tells only half the story.
A hotel can pay wages, suppliers and debt service and appear perfectly healthy.
But if it does not generate enough cash to reinvest, it is gradually consuming its own future value.
The problem often becomes visible only when the owner decides to sell.
That is when the market stops looking at what the hotel used to be.
It starts pricing the cost of turning it into what it now needs to become.
Succession should begin before there is any need to sell
This leads to perhaps the most important conclusion for hotel owners.
Preparing succession only when you decide to exit may already be too late.
Transferability must be built in advance.
That means working on:
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profitability;
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capex;
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organisation;
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delegation;
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management;
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reporting;
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distribution;
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contracts;
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positioning;
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financial structure.
A hotel that depends entirely on its owner, has difficult-to-normalise financial results and carries deferred investment is not yet a product ready for the market.
It must first be made transferable.
And that process can create more value than simply finding a buyer.
The greatest risk is not selling a hotel badly. It is discovering too late that the hotel is no longer saleable on the terms the owner had assumed.
Four 30-room hotels can become a 120-room operating platform
Consolidation does not necessarily mean selling to a chain.
There is another route: consolidating functions without necessarily consolidating ownership.
Four 30-room hotels can retain four separate owners and four separate identities.
But they can share:
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revenue management;
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administration;
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procurement;
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technology;
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marketing;
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training;
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maintenance;
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management control.
Operationally, they can begin to function like a 120-room platform.
It is less visible than a full acquisition, but it could prove highly significant for the future of independent hospitality.
The main obstacle is not technical.
It is cultural.
Sharing functions means giving up part of one's operating autonomy in exchange for greater efficiency and competitiveness.
For many small owners, that may increasingly become the rational choice.
Not every hotel should remain a hotel
There is also a less comfortable truth that the sector often prefers to avoid.
Some properties are no longer economically sustainable in their current configuration.
And preserving them as hotels is not always the best investment.
The Swiss market already shows conversions into:
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serviced apartments;
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hostels;
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residential use;
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senior living;
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lighter hospitality formats.
A serious hospitality policy should therefore distinguish between:
hotels that should be repositioned;
hotels that should be transformed;
hotels that should be guided through an orderly exit.
Artificially preserving a business model with no credible future does not protect value.
It merely postpones its destruction.
What Italy is really missing
The comparison with Switzerland therefore leads to a broader conclusion.
Italy does not necessarily need another hotel incentive scheme.
What it needs more urgently is a permanent infrastructure connecting capital, technical expertise and hotel businesses.
A system capable of linking:
valuation, credit, succession, investment, operations and the transaction market.
SGH does not necessarily need to be copied.
But it raises a question the Italian market will eventually have to answer:
who finances a good hotel that has real value, but that a buyer still cannot finance?
This will be one of the defining issues of the next decade.
Thousands of owners will approach succession.
Some heirs will choose not to continue the business.
Investors will continue to favour assets of sufficient scale and profitability.
Banks will continue, quite rightly, to assess risk.
Required investment will continue to increase.
The point at which these interests meet will not emerge automatically.
It will have to be structured.
The next hotel market will be a market of transferability
The most important lesson from Switzerland is therefore not simply about tourism.
It is about capital.
The strongest hotels will continue to find buyers.
Properties of sufficient scale will continue to attract hotel groups.
Prime real estate will continue to have a market.
The real opportunity lies in the middle:
hotels that have value, but are not yet investable.
This is precisely where advisory, management and capital can create the greatest value.
Not simply by finding a buyer.
But by creating the conditions that allow a buyer to actually complete the acquisition.
A hotel may be worth €6 million.
But if nobody can finance a €6 million transaction, value alone does not create a deal.
And in the years ahead, the difference between hotels that successfully pass from one generation to the next and those that gradually lose value will increasingly come down to one factor:
not how much they are worth, but how transferable they are.
The best time to prepare a hotel sale is before you need to sell
If you are considering a hotel sale, new investor, operating lease, family succession, management change or financial restructuring, looking for a buyer may not be the right first step.
First, you need to understand:
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what the hotel is genuinely worth;
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how much of that value can be financed;
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what capex it requires;
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what normalised profitability it can generate;
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what operating model can support it;
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what financial structure can make the transaction executable.
A hotel does not become saleable when it is put on the market. It becomes saleable when it has been prepared for the market.
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