Tourism Law in Europe

Italian Hospitality and Albergo Diffuso Sara d’Urso 1 1. Hospitality in Italy: A Few Numbers; 2. The Origins of Hospitality in Italy and its Evolution; 3. The Origins and Relevance of Albergo Diffuso ; 4. The Discipline of Albergo Diffuso ; 5. The Contractual Relationship Between Hotelier and Customer. 6. Conclusions 1. Hospitality in Italy: A Few Numbers In Italy tourism produces more than 5 percent of GDP and over 6 percent of the country’s employees work in tourism 2 . If you count overnight stays, in 2016 Italy ranks third in Europe, after Spain and France and grew at a rate of 6% compared to previous year. Italian hotel system occupies a leading position in the world for the number of rooms available, ranking fourth after USA, China and Japan, ahead of Germany and Spain. This determines that the growth in the number of available rooms is not among the highest (0.8%). Consequently, if we consider only the European perimeter, here too, Italian hospitality is a leader in terms of size for quantity of establishments and number of rooms (in 2015 16.4% of the entire EU market) and for the quality of proposals of the highest ranking categories 3 . Italian accomodation offer can count on 178.4 thousand accomodation establishments of which 18.6% (about 33 thousand) is represented by hotel establishments, with mid- range hotels in first position (15 thousand), and the remaining 81,4% from complementary businesses (145 thousand) of which over half is represented by rental 1 Università di Milano-Bicocca. 2 Source: Questioni di economia e finanza. Turismo in Italia: numero e potenziale sviluppo (Matters of economics and finance. Tourism in Italy: numbers and development potential) , in Occasional papers, n. 5050, Banca d’Italia, July 2017, p. 7. 3 Source of data: Ottavo rapporto sul sistema alberghiero e turistico ricettivo in Italia (Eight report on the hotel and tourist accommodation system in Italy), 2017, p. 9 et seq ., www.federalberghi.it